the close up

8/13/2019 The close up

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Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:3

mary ann doane

The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema

One of the earliest attempts to produce film theory, that ofthe French Impressionists in the 1920s, generated a conceptphotog -niewhich is usually considered to be theoretically incoherent. No doubtthis is due to the fact thatphotognieis designed to account for that whichis inarticulable, that which exceeds language and hence points to the very

essence of cinematic specif icity.Photognienames a supplementarity, anenhancement, that which is added to an object in the process of its sub-

ject ion to a photographic medium. For Epstein, it is inextricably boundup with an ethics: I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things,beings or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduc-

tion (Bonjour20). The close-up is the privi leged site for this experienceofphotognie, and Epstein of ten labored to produce a language that would

be adequate to this experience. Witness, for instance, the linguistic contor-

tions in his description of the close-up of a face breaking into a smile:

I will never f ind the way to say how I love American close -ups.

Point blank. A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now

face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an


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90 The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema

extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is

anatomical. The dcor of the fifth act is this corner of a cheek

torn by a smile. [. . .] The orography of the face vacillates. Seis-

mic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A

wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is

laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement,

imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit

splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-l ike smile cuts

laterally into the corner of the lips. (Magnification 9)

The description verges on the obscene, perhaps because it transformsthe face, usually reserved as the very locus of subjectivity, into a seriesof harsh and alien objects (a geographical site, a wave, a theater curtain,a piece of fruit, a keyboard). The excessiveness of Epsteins language isconsistent with the inescapably hyperbolic nature of the close-up. (Thetit le of Epsteins article is Magnif ication.) But in addition, Epsteins prose

extracts and abstracts the close-up from the scene, from the body, fromthe spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative, performing, in effect,its monstrosity. Any viewer is invited to examine its gigantic detail, itscontingencies, its idiosyncrasies. The close-up is always, at some level,an autonomous entity, a fragment, a for-itself.

The close-up has inspired fascination, love, horror, empathy,pain, unease. It has been seen as the vehicle of the star, the privilegedreceptacle of affect, of passion, the guarantee of the cinemas status as auniversal language, one of, if not themost recognizable units of cinematic

discourse, yet simultaneously extraordinarily dif ficult to define. (At whatdistance from the object or tightness of the frame does it begin? At whatpoint does the medium shot become a medium close- up and the mediumclose-up give way to the pure close-up?) For Walter Benjamin, the close-up was one of the signif icant entrance points to the optical unconscious,

making visible what in daily l ife went unseen.Epsteins extravagant language, perhaps unconsciously andcertainly despite the invocation of morality, delineates the close-up asa lurking danger, a potential semiotic threat to the unity and coherencyof the filmic discourse. The most heavily used close- up, that of the face,fragments the body, decapitating it (bringing to mind the perhaps apoc-ryphal story in which Griffiths producer, confronted with the close-up,complains, We pay for the whole actor, Mr. Griffith. We want to see allof him [qtd. in Heath 36]). The close-up in general is disengaged from


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d i f f e r e n c e s 91

the mise-en-scne, freighted with an inherent separability or isolation,a for-itself that inevitably escapes, to some degree, the tactics of con-tinuity editing that strive to make it whole again. Space is used upby the face or object, and the time of the moment, the time of Epsteinscontemplation, is expanded at the expense of the l inear time of narrative.The close-up embodies the pure fact of presentation, of manifestation, ofshowinga here it is. Gilles Deleuze, citing Bla Balzs, claims that the

close-up does nottear away its object from a set of which it would formpart, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it fromall spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state ofEntity (9596). Of all the different types of shots, it is the close-up thatis most fully associated with the screen as surface, with the annihilationof a sense of depth and its corresponding rules of perspectival realism.The image becomes, once more, an image rather than a threshold onto a

world. Or rather, the world is reduced to this face, this object.Perhaps this status as potential semiotic threat can help to

explain the pivotal role of the close-up in film history and theory. Anintensive and persistent search for the earliest incarnation of t he close-up

has characterized many historical accounts, and candidates range fromEdisons kinetoscopic record of a sneeze to the close shot of a bank robbershooting his gun toward the audience in Edwin S. Porters 1903 The GreatTrain Robberyto Grif fiths early melodramas. It is as though assigning the

close-up a definit ive and determinant chronology limited its threat. Withrespect to these discourses, Pascal Bonitzer raises the question, Why does

the first appearance of the close-up in cinematographic space always seem

to be contemporaneous with the first stammerings of a cinematographiclanguage? (29).1The close-up, together with an editing that penetratesspace and is at least part ially rationalized by that close-up, seems to mark

the moment of the very emergence of film as a discourse, as an art.For Balzs, the close-up was the technical condition of the art

of film (qtd. in Aumont 84). Epstein described the close-up as the soul ofthe cinema (Magnification 9). Writing in 1916, Hugo Mnsterberg natu-

ralized the close-up, reducing its potential danger by aligning it with themental act of attention; film was simply a simulation of the human mind,its techniques the technological embodiment of that minds capacities(3739). Over and against Mnsterbergs domestication and rationaliza -tion, the close-up has more frequently appeared as the mark of cinematicdif ference and specif icity, as in Epsteinsphotogniethe invocation of an

otherwise unknown dimension, a radically defamiliar ized alterity. Sergei


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ownership. In contrast, the Russian and French terms reject possession in

favor of transcendence (the image is truly larger than l ife), a scale thatguarantees unattainabil ity. I wil l return to this issue later in arguing that

the close-up performs the inextr icability of these two seemingly opposedformulations, simultaneously posing as both microcosm and macrocosm,detail and whole. The excessiveness, even hysteria, of much of film theorys

discourse on the close-up is symptomatic of a strongly felt loss specificto modernity. Faced with an accelerating rationalization, specialization,and disintegration of the sense of a social total ity, the subject clings to thehope of simulacra of wholeness. The close-up, with its contradictory status

(as both detail of a larger scene and totality in its own righta spectacleof scale with its own integr ity) responds to this need.

With the linguist ic turn of fi lm theory in the 1970s and thequasi-scienti fic approach of a scholar like Christian Metz, the elation and

insistence upon evaluation characteristic of early fi lm theorys approachto the close-up disappears. Yet, the close-up remains a pivotal figure. Inattempting to demonstrate why there is no unit in the cinema that cor-responds to the word in language (and hence why the cinema is alwaysspeechparole versus langage in Saussures terms), Metz invokes theclose-up as exemplary:

The image is always actualized . Moreover, even the imagefairly rare, incidentallythat might, because of its content,

correspond to a word is still a sentence: This is a particular

case, and a particularly revealing one. A close- up of a revolver

does not mean revolver (a purely virtual lexical unit), but

at the very least, and without speaking of the connotations, it

signif ies Here is a revolver! It carries with it a kind of here(aword which Andr Martinet rightly considers to be a pure index

of actualization). (67)

The close-up, more than other types of shots, demonstrates the deicticnature of the cinematic image, its inevitable indexicality. Mimicking thepointing finger, it requires no language and is not comparable to it. Withthe gesture of presenting its contents (making them actual), it supportsthe cinemas aspiration to be the vehicle of presence.

And yet, the most strident of analyses of the close-up insist upon

its all iance with a quite particular content, one that is indeed presentedas indissociable from the very mechanism of the technique: the humanface. The face is that bodily part not accessible to the subjects own gaze


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(or accessible only as a vir tual image in a mirror), and simultaneously itis the site that is seenand read by the otherhence its over-representation

as theinstance of subjectivity. The scale of the close-up transforms theface into an instance of the gigantic, the monstrous: it overwhelms. Theface, usually the mark of individuality, becomes tantamount to a theoremin its generalizability. In the close-up, it is truly bigger than life.

For Balzs, the close-up, whether of objects or the human face,

is inherently anthropomorphic: When the film close-up strips the veil ofour imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things andshows us the face of objects, it sti ll shows us man, for what makes objectsexpressive are the human expressions projected on to them. The objectsonly reflect our own selves. And yet, something of the object contami-nates the face in close-up as well: This most subjective and individualof human manifestations is rendered objective in the close-up (60). Theclose-up underwrites a crisis in the opposition between subject and object.

This is particularly true in the silent film, where both were mute andwhere both man and object were equally pictures, photographs, theirhomogeneous material [. . .] projected on to the same screen [. . .] (58).According to Jacques Aumont in Du visage au cinma, Balzs did notquite understand the radical consequences of his own theorythat a facefilmed intensively, even one in long shot, is always in close-up and thata close-up always represents a face: whether a human face or the face ofan object. The close-up and face are hence equivalent, interchangeable,and what they have in common, according to Aumont, is the operation

which produces a sur face that is sensible and legible at the same time,which produces, as Deleuze says, an Entity (85). The close-up trans-forms whatever it films into a quasi- tangible thing, producing an intensephenomenological experience of presence, and yet, simultaneously, thatdeeply experienced entity becomes a sign, a text, a surface that demandsto be read. This is, inside or outside of the cinema, the inevitable opera-

tion of the face as well.Deleuzes formulation is even more extreme: As for the faceitself, we will not say that the close-up deals with [ traite] it or subjectsit to some kind of treatment: there is no close-up ofthe face, the face isitself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, af fectionimage (88). This analysis hinges upon a quite precise definition of theface (which coincides with Bergsons definition of affect) and a hypotheti-

cal history in which the significance of the face is, in effect,compensatory.

The faces function as a privileged site of meaning makes up for a loss or


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lack. According to this quasi-evolutionary history, in order to become thelocation of the organs of reception (sight, hearing, taste, smell), the facehad to sacrifice most of its motoricity (87). Upon this largely immobilesurface, the features were then only capable of micromovements, butextraordinarily intense ones that conjoin to make up what we call expres-

sion. This history produces, for Deleuze, a definition of face:

Each time we discover these two poles in somethingref lecting

surface and intensive micro-movementswe can say that this

thing has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been envis -aged or rather faceified [visagif ie], and in turn it staresat us [dvisage], it looks at us [. . .] even if it does not resemblea face. (88)

I wil l return later to the way in which the gaze emerges as a crucial com-ponent at the heart of Deleuzes description of faceification. (Facial-ization, Brian Massumis translation inA Thousand Plateaus, strikes meas more felicitous.) But here, it is objects that, in the manner of Lacan,look back at us and objects that, like the face, have expressions and aretherefore capable of being facialized.

This understanding of the face requires that it be completelydetached from ordinary notions about its social semiotics. Traditionally,according to Deleuze, the face has been given three roles:

1. as the privileged site of individualization (it embodies eachpersons uniqueness);

2. as the manifestation of social role or social type;

3. as the primary tool of intersubjectivity, of relation to or commu-

nication with the other (this also refers to an adequate, mimetic

relation, within the individual, between face and character orrole).

Although the face, as traditionally understood, embodies these three roles

both inside the cinema (when it appears in medium or long shots) andoutside of it, the close-up effectively strips the face of all three: Thereis no close- up of the face. The close-up is the face, but the face preciselyin so far as it has destroyed its triple functiona nudity of the face muchgreater than that of the body, an inhumanity much greater than that ofanimals (99). The close-up pushes us beyond the realm of individuation,

of social role, and of the exchange that underlies intersubjectivity. This is


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why the face is indissociably linked with the process of effacement, a move

beyond codification, and why Deleuzes discourse at some points seemsto rejoin the ecstasy of Epsteinsphotognie .

In Deleuzes discourse, a particular filmic techniquetheclose-upis equated with a broad, cultural-semiotic phenomenon, thatencapsulated in the term face. Jacques Aumont, in a similar fashion,expounds upon the global significance of the face (which is, again, equiva-

lent to the close-up in the cinema, both producing a surface that is simulta-

neously sensible and legible). The face is the very origin of representation

insofar as it is founded upon resemblance and identity. When we say thatsomeone resembles or does not resemble someone else (or oneself, for that

matter), we are referring, above all, to the face. According to Aumont,

all representation is really inaugurated by the desire of man to

figure himself as face. In addition, the phrase it resembles i s

the first experience of representation [. . .].

What we call representation is nothing other than the

more or less complicated history of that resemblance, of its

hesitation between two poles, that of appearances, of the vis-

ible, of the phenomenon, of representative analogy, and that of

interiority, of the invisible or of the beyond-the-visible, of thebeing, of expressive analogy. The face is the point of departure

and the point of anchorage of this entire history. It is not possible

to represent without represent ing the face of man. (15) 2

Almost all theories of the face come to terms in some way with this oppo-sition between surface and depth, exteriority and interiority. There isalways something beyond, and it is this sense of the beyond that fuels thehystericization of film theory when confronted with the close-up. Theclose-up in the cinema classically exploits the cultural and epistemologi-cal susceptibility to this binary opposition. DreyersJoan of Arc, a chain

of close-ups that seem to constitute the very revelation of the soul, is theepitome of the genre. It is barely possible to see a close-up of a face with-out asking: what is he/she thinking, feeling, suffering? What is happen-ing beyond what I can see? Or, in Balzss terms, the close-up of the faceallows us to understand that we can see that there is something therethat we cannot see (76).

Hence are born all the metaphors of textuality, of the face asbook, of reading and legibil ity. The face is the intensification of a locusof signif ication. For Balzs, the spectator must be able to read betweenthe lines (76). In the natural order of things, the face constitutes a kind


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of universal language, and Balzs refers to the universal comprehensi-bility of facial expression and gesture (4445). However, the discoveryof printing displaced the site of intensive reading from the face to paper,providing so much to read that it gradually rendered illegible the faces of

man (39). The mission of the cinema, for Balzs, must be that of retrain-ing us to decipher the face. According to Susan Stewart,

The face is a type of deep text, a text whose meaning is com-

plicated by change and by a constant series of alterations

between a reader and an author who is strangely disembodied,neither present nor absent, found in neither part nor whole, but,

in fact, createdby this reading. Because of this convention ofinterpretation, it is not surprising that we find that one of the

great topoiof Western literature has been the not ion of the faceas book. (127)

In laying out the terms of this history of the analysis of thecinematic close-up, I have been attempting to emphasize not only its fre -quent recourse to hyperbolic rhetoric but also its insistence (outside ofthe case of Eisenstein) upon treating the close-up synchronically ratherthan diachronically, as stasis, as resistance to narrative linearity, as the

vert ical gateway to an almost irrecoverable depth behind the image. Thediscourse seems to exemplify a desire to stop the film, to grab hold ofsomething that can be taken away, to transfer the relentless temporality of

the narratives unfolding to a more manageable temporalit y of contempla-

tion. However, the theory is more adequate to the memory of the f ilm than

to its experience. In memory, it is possible to believe that the gaze of theface in close-up is directed at me, whereas in reality, given the stricturesof the classical cinema, it is more often caught in a network of other gazes.

The remembered close-up effects the reappearance of Benjamins aura(investing the object with the ability to look at us in return [Motifs

188]), but in a form that seems to embrace rather than resist technicalreproducibility. Yet, there is simultaneously a st rong denial that cinematicspecificity is at work herethe face and the close-up are equated in thearguments of Deleuze, Aumont, and even Balzs. Inevitably, these analyses

(part icularly those of Epstein and Balzs) produce nostalgia for the silentcinema, since it is the face that speaks there, and speaks to us (rather than

to other characters) so much more eloquently when mute.But does the close-up really produce the effects that are

assigned to it? Does it look at us? Does the close-up extract its object fromall spatiotemporal coordinates? Does it constitute a momentous pause in


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the temporal unfolding of the narrative? It is instructive to examine a fewexamples. Sessue Hayakawa, for instance, was a crucial f igure for Epstein

because of his relative restraint as an actor of the silent cinema, rejectingthe histrionics usual ly associated with the era. Given the stony immobil-ity of his face, a slight twitch of an eyebrow could convey extraordinarysignif icance. In Cecil B. De Milles 1915 The Cheat, a fi lm deeply markedby Orientalism, Hayakawa plays a nefarious Japanese businessman wholends money to a socialite (played by Fannie Ward) who has borrowedand lost charity funds in a bad Wall Street investment. Hayakawa, whohas amorous designs, refuses to allow her to pay him back (holding her totheir deal, which involved the exchange of sex for the money) and insteadbrands her as a sign of his sexual ownership. She shoots him, injuring him

in the shoulder, and her husband takes the blame. At the trial, tension isproduced as an accumulation of close-ups, connected by gazes saturated

with af fect. When asked the question Who fired that shot? Hayakawaglances down and to his left , angling his head just slightly so that he cansee around the lawyer and hold Ward in his gaze (fig. 1). The followingclose-up of her highlights her anxiety, eyes wide open, lower lip trembling

(fig. 2). In response, his close-up gives evidence of only a slight narrowing

of the eyes before he asserts that it was the husband who shot him (fig. 3).

Figure 1

Cecil B. De Mille,The Cheat, 1915.


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Figure 2


Figure 3



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Figure 4


Figure 5



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d i f f e r e n c e s 10 1

When the husband is on the stand, close -ups of Wards hyperbol ic anxiety

(fig. 4) are contrasted with those of Hayakawas barely mobile, smug com-

placency (fig. 5). The eyeline matches are quite precise, suggesting thatboth a space and an affective logic link the various close-ups.

The second example is from Queen Christina(Rouben Mamou-

lian, 1933), the film Roland Barthes mentions in his essay inMythologies,The Face of Garbo.3After Christina forfeits her throne and leaves hercountry in order to marry her lover, the lover is shot in a duel. The finalshot of the film is a slow track in to an extremely tight close-up of Garbothat is held for an unexpectedly long time (fig. 6). A lthough Garbos facehere seems to constitute a veritable zero degree of expression, its blank-ness nevertheless is forced into legibil ity by the pressure of the narrativeculminating in that moment.

Finally, in a f requently cited scene from Hitchcocks Sabotage(1936), Sylvia Sidney (Mrs. Verloc) appears to kill Oscar Homolka (Mr.

Verloc), but the stabbing itself takes place off-screen and is saturatedwith a certain undecidabil ity. Sidney has just learned that Homolka, using

her younger brother to carry a bomb, has caused his death and that of anentire busload of people. At the dinner table, as Sidney carves the meat, she

becomes fascinated by her own fascination with the knife as a potential

Figure 6

Rouben Mamoulian,Queen Christina,1933.


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Figure 7

Alfred Hitchcock,Sabotage, 1936.

Figure 8



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murder weapon and is alternately att racted and repelled by it. At one point,

the camera tracks in to a close-up of Sidney as she looks across the table at

Homolka (fig. 7). The next shot is a t ight close-up of Homolkas quizzicalexpression (fig. 8) followed by a close-up of the knife, fork, and potatoes,Sidneys hands wavering hesitantly above them, one hand reaching out tothe knife but quickly withdrawing (fig. 9). A series of glance-object cutsestablishes, first, her own guilty and murderous desire, and second, thegradual recognition by Homolka of that desire (fig. 10).

The legibility of all three instances of the close-up is intimately

linked to their very lackof autonomy. This is most visible in Sabotage,where the struggle between Sidneys desire and her resistance to thatdesire is produced betweenthe shots of her anxious face, the knife andpotatoes, Homolkas face, and her brothers empty chair, all of which sig-nify through a relay of gazes. According to Epstein, the close-up providesthe mimetic dcor in which the look suddenly appears as a character(Bonjour 22). As Bonitzer points out, the face in close-up brings withit a specific terror (that of the gaze) [. . .]. Without the close-up, withoutthe face, no suspense, no terror, domains so crucial to the cinema that itis almost identified with them (30). Hitchcock and, differently, Buuelunderstood well the limit of that terror as an attack on the eyes them-

Figure 9



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selvesnote the close-up of the cutting of the eye inUn Chien andalou, the

bloody eye sockets in The Birds, or the hollow eyes of the mothers skeleton

inPsycho. In the second example, The Cheat, Hayakawas impassive facewould be a complete cipher without its implantation betweenthe shots ofa hysterical Ward, her fearful husband, and the voyeuristic courtroomspectators, all mediated, again, by the lines of force of the gaze. In QueenChristina, the close-up seems most extractable, most autonomous (andhence seems to invite Barthess nostalgia: Garbo still belongs to thatmoment in cinema when capturing the human face stil l plunged audiences

into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human imageas one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolutestate of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced [56]).

Yet, Garbos completely expressionless face invites a reading that is indis-sociable from the narratives adamant production of overwhelming loss.Behind the perfect, seamless face, the unwavering stare, it is impossiblenot to project thought, emotion, although the face itself gives no indica-tion of either.

However, I am not confirming here the banal argument that the

close-up must always be read in context and that therefore film theorysespousal of the idea of its autonomy, its unavoidable despatialization, issimply wrong. Indeed, I would agree that there is always a residue of

Figure 10



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separability, an uncontainable excess, attached to the close-up. But thequestion remains : why the marked discrepancy between theorys exces-sive concentration on the close-ups extractability from all spatiotempo-ral coordinates, its production of a hitherto unknown dimension, and itspractice within specific films? Why is the memory of and desire for theclose-up as an autonomous entity so overwhelmingly strong? I would argue

that it has a great deal to do with an implicit politics of cinematic scale,most visibly incarnated in the close-up. The experience of photognie,of a cinphilia intimately bound up with the practice of the close-up,is indissociable from the experience of the big screen, the larger thanlife phenomenon of the cinema. As Bonitzer points out with reference toEisensteins comment, On the screen and only on the screen, a cockroach

is worth one hundred elephants (31).A number of theorists attempt to elaborate a politics of the

close-up or a politics of the face, but rarely is it formulated in relation toscale. According to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Theface is a politics [. . .]. Certain assemblages of power require the produc-tion of a face, others do not [. . .]. The reason is simple. The face is not auniversal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself,

with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes (181, 17576).In this text, the face is determined by a white wall /black hole systemthe

white wall of signifianceor the field of play of the signifier and the blackhole of subjectivity, of passion, consciousness, the illusion of a depth. Insuch a system, the face becomes the screen upon which the signifier isinscribed, reaff irming the role of the face as text, accessible to a readingthat fixes meaning. Simultaneously, the black hole allows access to anassumed interiority where passions and affects reside. The societies thatdo not require the production of a face are (predictably enough) primi-tive societies, societies that are collective, polyvocal, and corporeal asopposed to signifying and subjective. They do not operate through the

face but through the body, bringing into play heterogeneous forms andsubstances. The semiotic of capitalism, of what Deleuze and Guattaricall modern White Men, requires the face as a mixed semiotic of signifi-anceand subjectivity, both of which work to annihilate, or at a minimumconstrain, polyvocality. In this argument, the face is not preeminentlyhuman, as has been claimed so of ten, but inhuman, and the solution is to

work toward defacial izationnot in order to rehumanize the face, but todismantle it as t he pathway to the soul, to make it opaque and hence allow

human beings to become imperceptible, clandestine (171).


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For Aumont, on the other hand, the face has operated as thevery location of the human since it, together with the voice, allow us aprivileged access to the humanity of the other. The ordinary face, which

is that of the classical sound cinema where speech disciplines and domi-nates, is

an attribute of a free and equal subject with rights like all the

others but that must ceaselessly exercise its liberty and equality

in confronting that of other free and equal subjects. The ordi-

nary face of the cinema is also that of Western democracy, thatis to say, American and capitalist. It is a trait of imperialism,

its ordinariness is an order. (60)

The face in the cinema inherits certain tendencies of the portrait in itsreflection/production of the concept of the bourgeois subject, but it is theshot/reverse shot that consolidates that humanity as an aspect of inter-subjectivity.

Godard and Gorins strongly theoretical 1972 film, Letter toJane, subjects Jane Fondas expression in a photograph taken of her inNorth Vietnam (the photo that earned her the nickname Hanoi Jane) toan intense and frequently misogynist interrogation. In their analysis, herface is simply an expression of an expression, a copy of a long line of cin-

ematic faces including her own inKluteand Tout va bienand her fathersin Grapes of Wrathand Young Mr. Lincoln. It is an expression of vagueliberal concern, borrowed principal and interest from Roosevelts NewDeal, and it says nothing more than how much it knows (Letter to Jane).

It is the recapitulation of a quasi- Cartesian stance inflected by the require-

ments of a media-saturated society: I am f ilm, therefore I thinkat leastI think of the fact that I am being filmed. Godard and Gorins semioticanalysis of the photograph attempts to demonstrate that, despite Janespose of listening to the North Vietnamese, the photo speaks too much, it

drowns out the discourse of the North Vietnamese. Through framing andfocus, the photo represents a face that represents only its own status as astar, and refuses listening, refuses the possibility of a reverse shot.

The only film theorist who situates the politics of the close-upin relation to the question of scale is Eisenstein, with his emphasis on thesuperiority of the Russian termlarge scale or large shotto that of theEnglishclose-up. It is the very possibility cinema has of representingdisproportion, of interrogating and displacing realism, that opens up aspace for political critique. But for Eisenstein, with his cockroaches and


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elephants, the close-up is most significantly the close-up of objects, notof the human face:

The representation of objects in the actual (absolute) proportions

proper to them is, of course, merely a tribute to orthodox formal

logic. A subordination to an inviolable order of things [. . .].

Absolute realism is by no means the correct form of perception.

It is simply the function of a certain form of social structure.

(Film3435)

As opposed to the American cinemas use of the close-up to suggestproximity, intimacy, knowledge of interiority, Eisenstein argues for adisproportion that transforms the image into a sign, an epistemologicaltool, undermining identification and hence empowering the spectator asanalyst of, rather than vessel for, meaning.

However, the close-up in the classical Hollywood film hasnever simply connoted closeness and interiority. Rather, its legibility hasalways been allied with its scale and its status as a form of magnifica-tion. More than other types of shots, the close-up exploits the expanseof the screenthe face or the object filmed cover the screen, using up,exhausting all space. At least in part, this explains the theoretical fasci-nation with the d iegetic autonomy of the close-up, the repeated assertionthat it escapes the spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative. The fi lmis larger than l ife, but it is most visibly larger than li fe in the close-up,seemingly promising an expanded cognition and recognition. From thispoint of view, the semiotic status of the close-up seems to bear withinitself a structuring contradiction. Is the close-up a detail, a part of a larger

whole, or is it instead its own whole, its own totality? Balzs claims that [a]

multitude of close-ups can show us the very instant in which the generalis transformed into the particular (55). Benjamins notion of the opticalunconscious or the many discourses in film theory about the defamiliar-

izing properties of the close-up, its ability to force us to see those minuteaspects of life otherwise lost, buttress the idea that the close- up is, indeed,a detail. On the other hand, Balzs, who embraces the defamil iarizationargument, also argues that the close-up is not a detail because there is no

whole from which it is extracted. The space of the narrative, the diegesis,is constructed by a multiplicity of shots that vary in terms of both sizeand anglehence this space exists nowhere; there is no total ity of whichthe close-up could be a part. And certainly if one accepts the theoriesof the close-ups despatialization, it cannot be defined as a detail, since


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it occupies the only space there is, constituting itself as its own wholeor totality, abolishing off-screen space. Is the close-up the bearer, theimage of the small, the minute; or the producer of the monumental, thegigantic, the spectacular? This confusion, and the apparent collapse ofthe oppositions between detail and totality, part and whole, microcosmand macrocosm, the miniature and the gigantic, is crucial to the ideologi-

cal operation of the close-up, that which makes it one of our most potentmemories of the cinema.

Of course, it is possible to argue that there really is no contra-diction here since the status of the image as detail or totality depends upon

whether it resides in one or the other of the two worlds/spaces involved inthe cinemathe space of the narrative (the diegesis) or the space of thespectator. In the diegesis, that fictional space produced by the film, theclose-updespite Balzss denialwill always constitute a detail, a part.

Yet, in the spectators space, that of the theater, the close-up will, evenif only momentarily, constitute itself as the totality, the only entity thereto be seen. Three decades of film theory have insisted that the classicalcinematic text works to annihilate this space of the spectatorto suggestthat the only world is that on the screen. Hence, the embrace of the close-up as autonomous entity by Balzs, Deleuze, and especially Epstein, isan attempt to salvage spectatorial space, to reaff irm its existence and itsrelevance in the face of the closed, seamless space of the film. Becausescale as a concept in general can only be understood through its reference

to the human body, this celebration of the close-up is also an attempt toreassert the corporeality of the classically disembodied spectator.

In order to do so, however, one must effectively stop the film,deny it mobility and temporality, and, in addition, deny that the detail, the

miniature, also inhabits the gigantic, the spectacular, the space of the bigscreen. It is, ironically, to transform grandeur, largeness, and hence thespectacle into an ideologically subversive tactic, whereas we know this

is the reverse of the case in modernity. As Stewart argues, preindustrialculture located the gigantic in nature, as the origin of the formations oflandscape, but industrial capitalism allies the gigantic with consumer-ism, an exchange economy, and the commodity (on bil lboards, in adver-tising in general, and in the cinema) (7980). Guy Debord claims thatspectacle, the most striking instantiat ion of the gigantic in contemporaryculture, is a compensation for the loss of unity in the worldit expressesthe totality of this loss (29). For Stewart, the movie star exemplifies thecommodification of the gigantic : The fact that such subjects are larger


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than li fe is not a result of their historical acts so much as it is a matter oftheir medium of presentation [. . .]. And that formation, that generation ofsign by means of sign, provides the aesthetic corollary for the generativecapacity of commodity relations (91).

The miniature, on the other hand, relates to the commoditysystem as well, but in a di fferent way. For Stewart, the miniature repre-sents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural [. . .]. It is a

metaphor for the interior space and time of the bourgeois subject (70, xii).

The miniature can be held in the hand, possessed, and hence imparts anillusion of mastery, the imprimatur of the subject. The close-up is an object

of vision, not touch, but it nevertheless provokes a sense of the tangible, the

intimate. This is Benjamins desire of the masses to bring things closer, to

sacrif ice uniqueness for reproduction. Epstein writes, The close-up modi-

fies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch

out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes ofthis suffering. I would be able to taste the tears (Magnif ication 13). The

close-up, as an isolable entity, can be taken and held within memory, asa residual trace of the films commodification of time. As simultaneouslymicrocosm and macrocosm, the miniature and the gigantic, the close-upacts as a nodal point linking the ideologies of intimacy and interiorityto public space and the authority of the monumental. In the close-up,the cinema plays simultaneously with the desire for totalization and itsimpossibility. The cinematic spectator clings to the fragment of a partialrealitya fragment that mimics the effect of a self-sufficient totality. Theclassical close- up assures us that we can indeed see and grasp the whole,in a moment rich with meaning and affect.

It has often been said that we live in an age of the image, in asociety saturated by images. But, if this is so, that image always requires a

support, a screen, hence the equal aptness of noting that we live in an eraof the proliferation of screens as well. Contemporary culture is witness

to an exaggeration of the two extremes of screen size. While the screenbecomes smaller and smaller in personal computers, laptops, palm pilots,and cell phones, the television screen is becoming larger and larger incompetition with the construction of cinemas with stadium seating andmammoth screens. The screen haunts both private and public realms.Miniaturized, the image it bears can now literally be held in the hand,sustaining the illusion of its possession. Made gigantic in imax theaters,it presents the spectator with a vision of impossible totality, of moderntranscendence.


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The excessiveness and exuberance of the historical discourseon the close-up can, perhaps, help us to understand what is at stake in this

contemporary schizophrenia of scale. The French Impressionist concept of

photogniewas fashioned to evoke that which was inart iculable yet specific

to the fi lmic experience. Its unspeakability is no doubt linked to the desire

to make it a corporeal experience, a matter of touching, feeling, tast ing,as well as seeing. Yet, the historical t rajectory of classical cinema was todefeat that body by annihilating its space, its ability to act as a measureof scale.Photognieis usual ly referred to as one of the earliest examplesof cinphilia, a love of the cinema that insists upon its uniqueness and itsability to induce a form of incomparable ecstasy. Such an ecstasy seemedto celebrate, but actually resisted, the lure of absorption into the image,of losing oneself. Today, the gigantic screens of imax theaters work toreassert, to reconfirm, that possibility of absorption, which has playedsuch an important role in the history of cinema. In other words, it seemsnecessary today to exaggerate, to hyperbolize the cinema in order to beassured that it works. Yet, the possibility of its failure is also al layed by the

proliferation of miniature screens, so that it could be said that the screenis not simply enormous, it is everywhere. The inevitable limit to its magni-

tude is compensated for by its proliferation. Focusing on the close-up, thediscourse ofphotognieunconsciously elaborated the way in which detailand enormity, miniature and gigantic, are inextricable in the cinema. It is

the cinema, understood in this way, that laid the groundwork for a futurecultural logic of the screen.

mary ann doaneis George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media and ofEnglish at Brown University. She is the author of The Desire to Desire: T he Womans Film ofthe 1940s(Indiana University Press, 1987),Femmes Fatales: Femini sm, Film Theory, Psy-choanalysis(Routledge, 1991), The Emergence of Cinematic Ti me: Modernity, Contingency,the Archive(Harvard University Press, 2002), and has published a wide range of articleson feminist fil m theory, sound in the cinema, psychoanalytic theory, television, and sexualand racial difference in film.

Notes 1 All translations of Aumont,Bonitzer, and EisensteinsAu-d elare mine.

2 The grandiose or totalizingtendencies of these statementsare evidenced by the return ofthe term man used in a genericsense.

3 This essay is a critical textfor Naomi Schor inReading inDet ail, where she traces Barthessrelation to Hegelian aesthetics.See pp. 8184.


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Aumont, Jacques. Du visage au cinma . Paris: ditions de lEtoile/Cahiers du cinma,1992.

Balzs, Bla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Trans. Edith Bone.New York: Dover, 1970.

Barthes, Roland.Mythologi es. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill, 1972.

Benjamin, Walter. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. Il luminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed.Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. 155200.

. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduct ion. Illuminations.21752.

Bonitzer, Pascal.Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le c inma. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.

The Cheat. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount, 1915.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberjam. Minneapolis: uof Minnesota p, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. A T housand Plat eaus: Capi tal ism and Sch izophreni a.Trans. Brian Massumi. Min neapolis: uof Minnesota p, 1987.

Eisenstein, Sergei.Fi lm Form: Essays in F ilm Theory. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego:Harcourt, 1949.

. Au-del des toi les . Trans. Jacques Aumont et al. Paris: Union Gnral

ddit ions, 1974.

Epstein, Jean. Bonjour cinma and Other Writings. Trans. Tom Milne. Af ter image 10(1981): 839.

. Magni fication and Other Writings. Trans. Stuart Liebman. October3 (1977):925.

Heath, Stephen. Screen Images, Film Memory. Edinburgh 76 Magazine1 (1976): 3342.

Let ter to Jane. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard and Gorin, 1972.

Metz, Christian. Fi lm Language : A Semiot ics of the Cinema . Trans. Michael Taylor. NewYork: Oxford up, 1974.

Mnsterberg, Hugo. The Film: A Psychological Study, the Silent Photoplay in 1916. New

York: Dover, 1970.Queen Christina. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. mgm, 1933.

Sabotage. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Gaumont-British P icture Corp., 1936.

Schor, Naomi.Reading in Detail: Aesthe tics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, theCollection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1984.

Works Cited

the close up

Documents