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THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART
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to bring the object perceived closer to the audience. With the introduction oi the medium-shot came also the possibility of giving special emphasis to one 01 another part of the scene being filmed, by isolating it from the long-shot of the general scene. Correspondingly there was a change in attitude to the scale relationships between the object and the frame limits, since these limits now began to lose their original purpose as an abstract proscenium. With the arrival of the close-up this evolution found its natural completion. From the first day of its introduction into cinema practice the close-up broke down the tradition of the planning of the shot on theatrical lines. In due course it became a specific means of cinematic expression, and a stimulus to the understanding and working out of a theory of editing, apart from which the close-up loses most of its significance.1
The close-up is a means of concentrating the spectator's attention, of bringing the object nearer to him and so overcoming the space between him and the action of the film. It acquires genuine significance of expression only when utilised in a correct system of editing construction. The successive transition from one stage of closeness of the object to another must be based on the logic of the action or the compositional construction of the picture, when it creates a single line of influence on the spectator, from his illustrative perception of the long-shot to his intensively saturated perception of the close-up, through all the intervening stages of scale enlargement. Thus the spectator is no longer an ' outside observer I The camera brings him, so to speak, into the action, by picking out the close-ups and the details from the general scene, emphasising the more important moments of the action, accentuating their specific features, and revealing the relationships between the whole and the part, the general and the detail, which would remain imperceptible in a distant, illustrative long-shot.
In all cases the determination of the camera-angle to be adopted in accordance with the directorial shot system is dependent upon the proposed editing scheme for the film. Each of the camera-angles picked out by the camera is part of the
1 The ' discovery ' of the close-up is usually attributed to D. W. Griffith. This, in fact, is not quite accurate, for the close-up as a dynamic photo-portrait existed before him. Griffith was the first to realise its importance in the film's editing context, and so was able to work out pragmatically the elementary principles of editing theory. — N.
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