Term: Close-Up

A close-up is a shot in which a person’s face fills most of the screen, although the term can also refer to any shot that appears to have been taken at close range (or through a telephoto lens), and in which an object appears relatively large and in detail.

Early Development

In the early days of cinema, close-ups were considered difficult for audiences to adjust to. In films such as The Great Train Robbery (1903), which famously features an early close-up shot of a bandit pointing his gun at the audience, exhibitors were supplied with the shot separately, and could decide whether to attach it to the beginning or the end of the film, for special effect.

D.W. Griffith

D. W. Griffith is acknowledged as an early master of the integration of the close-up into the filmed story. In Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), shot on location on New York’s Lower East Side, a menacing Elmer Booth enters the frame and advances toward the camera, his face enlarged into a particularly effective close-up.

In the 1910s, as the camera drew ever closer to the actors, the idea of film dramas as a kind of recorded theatrical experience began to evolve into the idea of cinema proper, and the proximity of the camera had an enormous impact on the differentiation of acting styles in the cinema from those of the theater. Compare the subtlety of Lillian Gish’s stunning close-up in The Mothering Heart (1913) to her earlier performance in The Lonely Villa (1909).

Continued Development

The close-up ushered in new ideas about the possible representation of interior mental states, and was used as a syntactical element to introduce flashbacks (as a kind of subjective memory), dreams, hallucinations, and, perhaps most important for the development of mainstream cinema language, point-of-view shots, in which the audience is invited to follow the eye-line of a character’s gaze from one shot to the next. Many film theorists, such as Bela Balasz, have studied in detail the representational power of the close-up as an essential element of the cinema’s almost supernatural ability to cut through usual modes of perception. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was shot almost entirely in close-up, prompting critics like Balasz to describe it as a kind of “documentary of the soul,” in which the tools of photographic realism are used precisely to transcend normal modes of “realistic” representation.

Others, such as Sergei Eisenstein and the Russian Formalists, have argued that even close-ups have no inherent meanings, but are predominantly conditioned by the shots that precede and follow them. The famous “Kuleshov Experiment,” in which the same close-up of an actor’s face was followed by different images, changed the meaning of the actor’s expression. Rather than being a window onto the soul, the face in close up, for Eisenstein, to the extent it conveyed any immediate meaning, did so as a token or “type.”

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