Scaling Up

Vicissitudes of the Close-Up

The book is divided into two parts: Part I focuses on the historical and theoretical “vicissitudes” of the close-up, while Part II pulls back from the close-up to consider the larger concept of scale in terms of the cinema’s material conditions, specifically the screen and projection. This leads to the book’s extended meditation on the contemporary obsession with “immersion.” And, although it includes a trenchant critique of the zoom and its uses, the book, in terms of its structure, is a kind of “zoom-out” from the close-up and disruptions of scale at the “local” level to the global scope and large-scale projects of IMAX, “immersive” technologies, Google Earth, and other platforms and practices for delineating the globalized, derealized, hyper-mediated spaces associated with the “incessant expansion of commodification” (22). Ambitious in scope, the book nonetheless suggests that the (filmic) local always contained worlds—implicating the cinema in the “global imaginary” from the start. The book hesitates a bit in terms of where it lands on the definition of “modernity” (a fraught term among many in the book), ultimately drawing on Tani Barlow’s formulation of “colonial modernism” to understand cinema’s claims to universal language, its refusal of difference, and its carving up of space.

Doane’s interest in the close-up is “two-pronged”: aimed at the close-up both as a site of expressivity and interiority, and as it has functioned in film theory—“as a privileged figure of cinematic specificity” (135). The first chapter examines the latter, interrogating the “ecstatic” reactions to the close-up in the history of film theory—not to correct, exactly, but rather to read these reactions as symptomatic, as the product of the ideological work of the close-up. Beginning with early theorists like Balázs and Epstein, Doane suggests that the close-up’s “reconfiguration of space and scale . . . haunts film theory throughout its course, even up to the work of Gilles Deleuze.” (30). She notes the way some of these theories retain traces of physiognomy, the pseudo-scientific and aesthetic practice of reading character from the features and contours of the face, popularized by Lavater’s eighteenth-century text on the subject. Careful not to lump all these theorists together (she differentiates Epstein’s photogénie from Balázs’s more “physiognomic” approach, for example), Doane nonetheless identifies the larger forces that elicit these hyperbolic reactions. The close-up allows us to experience the gigantic and the miniature at the same time: simultaneously part and whole, graspable piece and awe-inspiring, overwhelming totality, the close-up “compensates for a loss specific to modernity” (37). It is this “ideological operation,” Doane suggests, that inspires all the critical swooning and découpage, and that also makes the close-up our “most potent memory of the cinema” (48).

The next two chapters take a more historical approach to the close-up and its close association with the face; in this sense, Doane’s study takes its place alongside a number of recent studies (e.g., Steimatsky, Belting, Edkins) that have shown a renewed scholarly interest in the face on film and elsewhere—spurred, no doubt, by the centrality of facial recognition, deepfakes, and other face-based technologies in digital culture. Beginning with early cinema and the knowing playfulness of films like The Big Swallow (1901) or Méliès’ The Man with a Rubber Head (1901), she traces the shifting fortunes of the close-up, especially in the transitional era, when critics expressed unease with these enormous screen faces, reading them as scary or grotesque—or at the very least, distracting—before the close-up was tamed, domesticated as the sign of interiority and character, and stitched into the continuity system. This trajectory has been explored in detail by early film historians and theorists (e.g., Keil, Hansen, Gunning, etc.), but Doane’s reading emphasizes this history as a revealing chapter in the larger story of scale. She inserts the uneasy reactions to the close-up into the larger history of measurement—more specifically, methods and units of measurement and their historical relation (and increasing lack of relation) to the human body. Doane considers the early preference for ‘life-size’ figures on the movie screen and the uneasiness around rules of “proper proportion,” taking the long historical view, from DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man to Le Corbusier’s insistence on human scale in architecture. This opens out into a consideration, through Lefebvre, of the production of space—here applied to the way the cinema produces and negotiates various kinds of space: screen space, story space, representational space, and the space of the theater/spectator, all relevant to Doane’s insistence that we must have a more complex and nuanced understanding of “the spectatorial experience of space” (77). This effort to account for the multiple spaces and discourses at work in the production of cinematic space is one of the most significant contributions of the book.

As has been much noted, the terms for the cinema’s most celebrated shot differ across languages—the “close-up” in English is the “gros plan” (large shot) in French, for example. For Doane, this “structuring ambiguity” (79), this hesitation between “close” and “big” is a sign of the suppressed (but fundamental) abstraction or spatial sleight-of-hand at the heart of cinema: the translation of size on screen into distance in diegetic space. The close-up has been “derided and applauded” because it threatens to give up the game: “carrier of spatial anomaly, imperiling the oppositions of surface versus depth and closeness versus distance, [the close-up] addresses a subject whose sense of location has become fragile, precarious” (88). In other words, there is something excessive and threatening about the close-up because it calls attention to the spatial distortion and “fundamental discontinuity” of cinema (84). Again, this flatness or separateness-as-threat has been much noted (whether understood via the fetish or the Deleuzian affection-image), but Doane re-frames it in terms of the spatial relations of modernity and commodification. If the experience of space has been “warped,” “condensed,” and “disarticulated” by the “forces of modernity,” then, Doane argues, the cinema had to “negotiate the hazards of the close-up” in order to provide spectators with “the possibility of sure navigation” (88).

The final chapter of the first section considers the face and facial expressions, a topic with a long history, but one which took on new meaning in the cinema in the teens, when the rise of stardom and the focus on “emotional” or “realistic” acting made the legibility of the face (that is, the readability of emotions) particularly valuable. Here, Doane leads us through an extended meditation on the popular idea of film as “universal language” and how this figured in the colonial imaginary. The discussion of facial expression (including facial expression films and critical discourse on acting and the cinema) leads inevitably to the woman’s face as “the site of a privileged performance of faciality” (127) and the bearer of emotional expressiveness on screen. The figure of the woman is key to Doane’s overall argument: as she notes, if her interest in the close-up is “two-pronged”—concerned with both its expression of interiority and its alliance with cinematic specificity—then “[c]lose-ups of the faces of women act as a kind of hinge between these two concerns” (135). Indeed, the figure of the woman acts as a hinge in the book as well, as the discussion of women’s faces and emotional expressiveness leads to the next section’s consideration of the female face and the screening of modernity.

Woman as Screen

Doane is interested here not just in the woman’s face on screen but the woman’s face as screen, expanding her discussion of women’s faces to “modernity, urban spaces, and the relation of all of these to the concept of the screen” (140). Beginning with Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks and then moving to works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, she demonstrates that when it comes to “sexual politics,” the avant-garde and mass culture have been “dangerously tangential” (170). This part of the study moves not only to the avant-garde but also to other sites of analysis, including close readings of films from the Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and contemporary art cinema. Ultimately, Doane argues that the woman’s face—at times modified to “the white woman’s face”—functions as a “blockage” to the knowability/legibility of the face and its close association with the dream of film as a universal language: the faces of women as surface, as disallowing depth, “produce noise within this system, for their faces are seen not read” (140). In this way they come to figure the “anxiety about legibility” in cinema. This sounds similar, at times, to familiar theories of the woman/Hollywood star as icon and fetish, interrupting the narrative drive, gendered male. But Doane is reading this stoppage in a different way here, not just as a threat to masculinity, but as a threat to the entire cinematic illusion and the distortion of scale and abstraction of space upon which it depends. Still, the (almost) singular focus on gender is somewhat limiting at times. If the “white woman” functions as screen, then certainly in some cases the whiteness is as important as the woman, something Doane gestures to in her reference to recent work (by Genevieve Yue and others) on the standard practice of using “China girls” (typically white women) to calibrate color on film. This leaves one wondering about other figures (e.g., racialized or threatening/exploited figures) that may have functioned in similar ways with regard to screen and scale, and how that might relate to the argument Doane is forwarding here. Certainly, the cinema has projected colonialist fantasies onto racialized and “othered” bodies, and those bodies have been linked to the apparatus in various ways to signal universality, cinema-as-modernity, and global expansion. Nonetheless, by tracing the way the figure of the woman threads through so many of the spatial problematics of the cinema, Doane goes beyond questions of narrative to questions of scalar logic and ultimately to the larger implications of that logic: that the “economy of the image in modernity is most emphatically an economy of scale” (188).

No discussion of space in film would be complete without a reckoning with perspective, and Doane takes the opportunity to revisit one of the fundamental debates in film theory: Renaissance perspective and the construction of the transcendental subject as a model for the spectator in cinema. Given the various critical turns of the last few decades, returning to 1970s apparatus theory at this point seems like returning to the scene of some alleged film theoretical crime. While Doane doesn’t exactly reclaim apparatus theory, she offers some gentle reminders of its contribution. While noting the shortcomings of that work, she also suggests that contemporary theories of film spectatorship have forgotten the most important contribution of theorists like Metz, Baudry, and Comolli: the idea that the spectatorial position is an ideological one. Noting that apparatus theory’s interest in Renaissance perspective was quite narrow (and not particularly concerned with its complicated history), Doane takes a deep historical dive into the theories and practices of perspective in visual art and elsewhere, leaning here on art history’s more nuanced accounts. Other theorists have taken this on (Crary, Friedberg, etc.), but Doane winds up in different territory, discussing not only the importance of perspective to cartography and the world-defining equation of physical size with spatial distance in representation, but also the role played by the concept of “the infinite.” In her reading, the idea of infinity becomes a key epistemological turning point, and the vanishing point in perspectival art becomes not just a pictorial but a conceptual value—one that, once again, devolves on the figure of the woman. The woman’s body yokes literal and figurative vanishing points, at once a fixed position and an entryway to “the infinite”: moving from Durer’s Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, Doane traces how “‘[p]ossession of the world’ is in collusion with mapping, perspective, and proprietorship of the woman’s body” (223). Further, she notes that since apparatus theory’s arguments about perspective devolved on the construction of a stable, “monocular” and “rationalizable” spectatorial position, it misses “the founding exorbitance of the concept of infinity, of that which escapes vision . . . an exorbitance that in the history of art has been conflated with the body of woman.” (230).

Rhetoric of the Zoom

This unpacking of the infinite’s place in the construction of the spectator/subject is crucial to the last third of the book, as Doane moves from cinema-as-orienting-force (via the management of scale) to the destabilizing and disorienting positions offered by contemporary technologies and modes of vison, including those defined by their ability to “locate” and “orient” us in space (e.g., GPS, Google Earth). Moving from satellite imaging and global positioning to the zoom, Imax, and “immersive technologies” more generally, Doane reconsiders some of the fundamental questions (and assumptions) of contemporary film and media theory: To what degree do these new technologies mark a fundamental break with the cinematic model of spectatorship? What do we really mean by a “disembodied spectator,” and upon what definitions of embodiment do contemporary promises of “immersive” media experiences depend? While Doane recognizes fundamental shifts, even breaks with, former systems for orienting the spectator, the work of the book makes it easier to see current modes of dislocation and immersion as logical consequences of the cinema’s spatial logics, defined and demanded by the permutations of commodification and consumer culture.

The book’s consideration of what I would call the rhetoric of the zoom gives a sense of how close reading works within Doane’s sustained analysis of larger philosophical, technological and historical structures. She begins with an analysis of Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames), the 1977 film that announced itself as “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe,” to examine a kind of zoom mentality—the zoom as “a vehicle of vison and knowledge” aligned with technological vision. That the film is not the product of a zoom lens but rather a “manufactured zoom” only bolsters the sense of the zoom as a rhetoric rather than merely a technological feat. She positions this film and its impossible views as a kind of precursor and analogue to tools like Google Earth and its “stitched together” global vision. She then moves to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011)—not an IMAX film but one that has “IMAX aspirations,” as Doane puts it. Doane reads the film’s ambivalence—its visible struggle between different registers and different modes of representation, its tendency to swerve between the trite and the transcendent—as a reflexive tension that reflects a doomed search for the sublime. Doane’s reading takes us through theories of the sublime, through Longinus and Kant, and back to aspirational IMAX and the ecstatic desire for immersion. The journey allows us to re-evaluate the category of the sublime—its lure and its vulnerability. Doane gives Malick credit for trying to reach for something beyond the image reservoir of capitalism, but she shows how easily the sublime can topple into the language of advertising. Tree of Life becomes a case study, then, aiming for the stars but landing on something more earthbound: an “IMAX sublime” (261). Here, whether via the rhetoric of the zoom or the fantasy of immersion, it seems that the spectator is caught somewhere between the rock of illusory dominance and the hard place of the commodity form.

The critique of immersion offers another opportunity to take up embodiment. Noting that “[u]nlike the disembodiment of the classical perspectival system, the body seems to be what is above all at stake in discourse on IMAX,” Doane goes on to insist that “immersion as a category is symptomatic, and one has to ask what this body is” (253). She offers a nuanced corrective to the tendency to posit an “embodied” spectator and “immersive experience” as the necessarily positive answers to the problem of the disembodied spectator—without really saying what we mean by “embodied.” Immersion may promise to give us “all the feels,” but, Doane argues, its “appeal to the body . . . radically delocalizes the subject once again, grasping for more to see, more to hear, more to feel in an ever-expanding elsewhere” (253). Doane is suspicious of what is largely an industry marketing term, and she chides contemporary media theorists for adopting it unquestioningly, at times even rapturously. In this way, the end of the book rhymes with the beginning, when Doane critiqued the “ecstatic” reactions to the close-up in early film theory. It is fitting that a book that begins with the close-up ends with immersion, as the idea of being enveloped or even consumed by the screen image is there in the earliest motion pictures (e.g., The Big Swallow), and in those early responses to the close-up. Waxing poetic about the face of silent film star Sessue Hayakawa, Jean Epstein claimed he “aimed his face like a revolver” and “the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as if in a funnel, toward the film.”4

For Doane, promises of immersion are part of a larger project, testifying to a “symptomatic crisis of location, a despatialization, a reconceptualization of position, scale, and infinity that undergird the mechanisms of late capitalism and its incessant expansion of commodification” (176). Contemporary media technologies promise just such an endless expansion—an “expansion of space to envelop the spectator, to surround them in the production of a vicariously lived space.” For Doane, this represents “a commodification without object—the commodification of environment” (263). In this sense, Doane’s conceptualization of space and scale offers a corollary to her earlier work on cinematic time. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, she traced the ways photography and cinema were “crucial to modernity’s reconceptualization of time and its representability” (4); but this was always also about space, as questions of storage and the archive mediated cinema’s relationship to time. If, in that project, Doane theorized the ideological “collusion” between “rationalization and contingency”—in which contingency offers the “appearance of absolute freedom” (11) within modernity’s systematic rationalization and control—then here, the illusion of spatial mastery conceals our dislocation; our sense of being found (ever-located and ever-locating) conceals that we are lost. The very forces that disorient us serve as our compass.

Throughout, Doane’s approach is archaeological and etymological. She puts the fundamental terms of film criticism and theory under pressure, revealing the history congealed in and concealed by language and asking us to examine our own theoretical investments. Looking at the close-up in the context of a thoroughgoing engagement with scale, moving back and forth between the small and the big picture, the book’s argument can be vertiginous and even seemingly contradictory at times; the thread connecting the first and second halves of the book can seem attenuated. Scale, after all, is a big subject. But, as forcefully as ever, Doane’s argument dwells in the contradictions, and she is ultimately able to pull seemingly disparate sites of analysis back together again. Beginning with the close-up and ending up in space (with images of Earth), Doane asks us to think about the spatial relations that prop up commodity relations, and to do so by thinking about the cinema’s distortion of scale. In so doing, we can understand the relation (or lack of relation) between the real and imaginary—or literal and figurative—situation of the subject. Along the way, the book also makes a compelling case for the continuing relevance of the cinema in a “post-cinematic” era. Still, Doane acknowledges the struggle to find a way through—like so many critics of contemporary culture, she worries about identifying a problem without offering a solution, or at least a strategy for resistance. Ironically, Doane poses the idea of getting lost, of “going astray,” as a way of unsettling or dislodging from the visual technologies that incessantly “locate” us. If, as Doane suggests, the story of navigating space in commodity culture has been a story of being lost and found—of being relocated in and by the cinema—then wading into the unknown and embracing uncertainty may be the only way out.

Author Profile

Alice Maurice is Associate Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minnesota, 2013) and the editor of Faces on Screen: New Approaches (Edinburgh, 2022). Her work has appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and a number of anthologies.

Notes

1. Béla Balázs, Visible Man, Or, The Culture of Film (1924), in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 28.

   Return to note reference.

2. Jean Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October, Vol. 3 (Spring, 1977): 9.

   Return to note reference.

3. Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 56.

   Return to note reference.

4. Epstein, 15.

   Return to note reference.