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THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PHYSICAL EXISTENCE 47
Annie's longing for reunion with her husband. A knowingly chosen detail of her physique thus would help establish the whole of her being in a dramatic interest.
The same obviously holds true of another famous Griffith close-up: Mae Marsh's clasped hands in the trial episode of Intolerance. It almost looks as if her huge hands with the convulsively moving fingers were inserted for the sole purpose of illustrating eloquently her anguish at the most crucial moment of the trial; as if, generally speaking, the function of any such detail exhausted itself in intensifying our participation in the total situation.14 This is how Eisenstein conceives of the close-up. Its main function, says he, is "not so much to show or to present as to signify, to give meaning, to designate." To designate what? Evidently something of importance to the narrative. And montage-minded as he is, he immediately adds that the significance of the close-up for the plot accrues to it less from its own content than from the manner in which it is juxtaposed with the surrounding shots.15 According to him, the closeup is primarily a montage unit.
But is this really its only function? Consider again the combination of shots with the close-up of Annie's face: the place assigned to the latter in the sequence intimates that Griffith wanted us also to absorb the face for its own sake instead of just passing through and beyond it; the face appears before the desires and emotions to which it refers have been completely defined, thus tempting us to get lost in its puzzling indeterminacy. Annie's face is also an end in itself. And so is the image of Mae Marsh's hands. [Illus. 11] No doubt it is to impress upon us her inner condition, but besides making us experience what we would in a measure have experienced anyway because of our familiarity with the characters involved, this close-up contributes something momentous and uniqueit reveals how her hands behave under the impact of utter despair.*
Eisenstein criticizes the close-ups in Griffith films precisely for their relative independence of the contexts in which they occur. He calls them isolated units which tend "to show or to present"; and he insists that to the extent that they indulge in isolation they fail to yield the meanings which the interweaving processes of montage may elicit from them.16 Had Eisenstein been less possessed with the magic powers of montage he
* Balazs, Der sichtbare Mensch, p. 73, defines the meaning of the close-up in a similar way. In his review of George Stevens's A Place in the Sun, Mr. Bosley Crowther says of the typical close-up in this film that it is "contrived to catch the heartbeat of agitated blood in youthful veins, the heat of flesh released from pressure, the flash of fear or desperation in troubled eyes." (Crowther, "Seen in Close-up," The New York Times, Sept. 23, 1951.)