Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

by Mary Ann Doane

In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.

Genres: Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

Published March 18, 2022

Reviews

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The ‘turn’ in classical Hollywood films is often activated in the service of scenes of misrecognition, where it reveals a mistaken identity. For the turn makes visible that which was concealed – the ‘other side’ – an other side that does not materially exist in the two-dimensional realm of cinema but is continually evoked, imagined, assumed. The turn is a constant reiteration of otherness and the limits of knowability, a denial of the sufficiency of the screen as surface”