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THE CLOSE-UP
ONE OF GREATEST TECHNICAL AND ARTISTIC ADVANCES
MADE BY THE FILM
By C. H. Barnick
One of the most important advances in the development of the film occurred on the day when, for the first time, a cinema camera, furnished with a Jupiter lamp, was brought close up to the face of a cinema actor, and the " close-up " picture was made. This event marked an important line of differentiation between the cinema and the stage. The advent of the close-up marked out an individual path for the film, and made it what it is today : an artistic microscopy of acting.
If we watch an actor on the stage, we can only see him in the whole. If he laughs or weeps, if he speaks a monologue in angry mood, it is always the whole man who laughs or weeps, the whole of an angry person that we see. Thus, the actor forms in a certain sense a convention apart. He is an indivisible being, a unit that cannot be destroyed, or resolved into various parts.
This was originally the case with the film. Formerly the film was merely the transposition from the plastic stage to the two dimensional screen, with, additionally, the surrounding setting or landscape.
The came the close-up, and suddenly the actor, till then indivisible, was split into a thousand separate fractions of the event in course of being acted. With the close-up, it is possible to differentiate fractions of a smile, the twist of the mouth, or an eyebrow raised in wonder, and keep the pose for a whole scene.
Complete dramas or entire comedies can can be revealed by the close-up in an actor's or actress's face, but who would have thought it possible before the introduction of the close-up ? The finest of opera glasses will not, even in the best circumstances, allow a spectator at a theatre to see the actor's face torn with anguish, save in natural size. But the face does not live a life of its own. It is only the mimic accompaniment of the text, and joins this in an indivisble unity.
This is the reason why certain little peculiarities and mannerisms of celebrated cinematographic actors have a very great importance, and have become identification signals for the enthusiastic public. Chaplin's moustaches, Douglas Fairbanks' luminous mouth, Harold Lloyd's eyes, with their half ironic half stupid expression would never have reached world-wide fame had their owners been stage actors instead of film stars. Charlie Chaplin's down at heel boots, or the good-natured childish face of Jannings, or the coquettish laugh of Lya de Putti would never have obtained on the stage the effect they make in the film with the close-up.
Long before close-up was thought out, Urban Gade wrote that the film was not for psychological dramas, that it ought not to represent scenes limited to theatrical litera