HOW DOES IT FEEL?
‘There is a famous legend which has it that Griffith, moved by the beauty of his leading lady, invented the close-up in order to capture it in greater detail’ - Jean-Luc Godard
Early Hollywood’s pre-eminent reflective surface.
Cleaving to the tenet that one should always judge a book by its cover, I’ve just started Lilian Gish’s account of what it’s like to be the girl for whom they came up with the close-up. Godard’s own close-ups tends to be less reverent than Griffiths’: his early Sixties output is full of shots where he appears to have shoved a lens in Anna Karina’s face and waited for something – a tic, a smirk, a flush – to happen to it. The most famous is in Vivre sa vie, where Karina’s Nana goes to see The Passion of Joan of Arc (a film centred on close-ups of Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s excruciatingly expressive visage*). Even seen in isolation, the scene is capable of initiating a weird form of affective contagion - watching Karina crying watching Falconetti crying, it becomes bizarrely hard not to well up too.
L-R: Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Mocked (1495), Bill Viola’s Quintet of the Astonished (2000), Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc
Bill Viola’s Quintet of the Astonished, a piece loosely based on a Bosch painting, covers similar territory. The difference here is that the close-up’s not so much spatial as it is temporal: the actors were filmed at 384 frames per second (as opposed to film’s standard 24fps) and the footage is played back at a sixteenth of the speed. From 3D blockbusters to viral croissant porn, filmmakers are experimenting with higher framerates; what’s interesting with Viola is how his use of high-speed photography highlights our capacity to register and respond to microexpressions and affective currents at a preconscious level, without even knowing it.
One of the areas where this capacity becomes intriguing is fashion photography: Elizabeth Wissinger has suggested that while we tend to think of models’ appeal in terms of how well they fit particular ‘types’ (say prom queen, ethereal ingenue, Weimar vamp or inbred landed gentlewoman), it might be as important for them to be able to condense or oscillate between contradictory attitudes/moods/expressions**. The idea, Wissinger argues, is to amplify ‘affect’ - the ambiguous charge you get just prior to working out what emotion it is you’re feeling. Thus the Aggy-style ‘oi’ mouth that could be about to resolve into an expression of incredulity, glee or hostility – or, in the case of models who do a lot of swimwear catalogues, that sultry yet panicked look that you have to suppose is meant to come across as titillating yet unthreatening. This notion that they have faces which we find difficult to read or solve would also explain how borderline troll-like or natally oxygen-deprived models like Anja Rubik, Hanne Gaby Odiele or, cardinaly, Lindsay Wixson can often look. So just bear that in mind if a certain little wedding-stealing someone gets scouted before you do.
* and, by extension, her rad proto-pixie crop.
**sort of like the way MSG baffles our tastebuds to the extent that they request another Pringle/forkful of chow mein.
