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Page 17
If on the stage the hand movements of the actor catch our interest, we
no longer look at the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the
hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit his crime. Our
attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. It
becomes the central point for all our emotional responses. We do not see
the hands of any other actor in the scene. Everything else sinks into a
general vague background, while that one hand shows more and more
details. The more we fixate it, the more its clearness and distinctness
increase. From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again
concentrates our senses on this one point. It is as if this one hand
were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything
else had faded away. On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can
really fade away. That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the
ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a
little detail. The whole body of the hero and the other men and the
whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on
obtruding themselves on our senses. What we do not attend cannot be
suddenly removed from the stage. Every change which is needed must be
secured by our own mind. In our consciousness the attended hand must
grow and the surrounding room must blur. But the stage cannot help us.
The art of the theater has there its limits.
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which
feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a
breath or two become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while
everything else has really faded into darkness. The act of attention
which goes on in our mind has remodeled the surrounding itself. The
detail which is being watched has suddenly become the whole content of
the performance, and everything which our mind wants to disregard has
been suddenly banished from our sight and has disappeared. The events
without have become obedient to the demands of our consciousness. In the
language of the photoplay producers it is a "close-up." _The close-up
has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention
and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power
of any theater stage._
The scheme of the close-up was introduced into the technique of the film
play rather late, but it has quickly gained a secure position. The more
elaborate the production, the more frequent and the more skillful the
use of this new and artistic means. The melodrama can hardly be played
without it, unless a most inartistic use of printed words is made. The
close-up has to furnish the explanations. If a little locket is hung on
the neck of the stolen or exchanged infant, it is not necessary to tell
us in words that everything will hinge on this locket twenty years later
when the girl is grown up. If the ornament at the child's throat is at
once shown in a close-up where everything has disappeared and only its
quaint form appears much enlarged on the screen, we fix it in our
imagination and know that we must give our fullest attention to it, as
it will play a decisive part in the next reel. The gentleman criminal
who draws his handkerchief from his pocket and with it a little bit of
paper which falls down on the rug unnoticed by him has no power to draw
our attention to that incriminating scrap. The device hardly belongs in
the theater because the audience would not notice it any more than would
the scoundrel himself. It would not be able to draw the attention. But
in the film it is a favorite trick. At the moment the bit of paper
falls, we see it greatly enlarged on the rug, while everything else has
faded away, and we read on it that it is a ticket from the railway
station at which the great crime was committed. Our attention is focused
on it and we know that it will be decisive for the development of the
action.
A clerk buys a newspaper on the street, glances at it and is shocked.
Suddenly we see that piece of news with our own eyes. The close-up
magnifies the headlines of the paper so that they fill the whole screen.
But it is not necessary that this focusing of the attention should refer
to levers in the plot. Any subtle detail, any significant gesture which
heightens the meaning of the action may enter into the center of our
consciousness by monopolizing the stage for a few seconds. There is love
in her smiling face, and yet we overlook it as they stand in a crowded
room. But suddenly, only for three seconds, all the others in the room
have disappeared, the bodies of the lovers themselves have faded away,
and only his look of longing and her smile of yielding reach out to us.
The close-up has done what no theater could have offered by its own
means, though we might have approached the effect in the theater
performance if we had taken our opera glass and had directed it only to
those two heads. But by doing so we should have emancipated ourselves
from the offering of the stage picture, that is, the concentration and
focusing were secured by us and not by the performance. In the photoplay
it is the opposite.
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