CLOSE-UP AND NORM

Closer framing of characters was also resisted on the basis of general aesthetic principles. The credibility of the type of narrative based on closer framing was undermined—I shall argue—by traditional norms of proxemic behaviour and by the traditional notion of spatial homogeneity.

Some Russian critics were convinced that, beautiful as they might be, facial close-ups looked grotesque.65 _{Articles were published depicting the repulsive naturalism of gigantic heads. As Yuri Lotman}

suggests, these reactions recalled (sometimes explicitly) the famous passage in Gulliver’s Travels describing the hero’s disgust as he looks at a giantess breastfeeding her child.66

There is one peculiarity common to such articles: none of them refers to the insertion of a non-facial detail; the attack is aimed exclusively at facial close-ups. This leads me to think that the response may have been conditioned by proxemic norms. As some studies in cultural anthropology have shown, distances between people are related to (indeed, dictated by) the chosen genre of interpersonal communication. Edward T.Hall distinguishes between four classes of ‘informal distance’: public (10 to 22 feet), social- consultive (4 to 10 feet), personal (1.5 to 4 feet) and intimate (less than 1.5 feet), which—as the author stresses—are valid for ‘middle-class Americans of North European origin’.67 _{While there is no point in}

directly applying the rules of social behaviour in modern society to the medium of an earlier epoch and a less clearly specified cultural field, I do not see why this cannot be done with reserve (especially since anthropologists themselves readily take their examples from art and literature). Here are some aspects of

proxemics that may help us understand the calamities of early film reception. Experiments show that at the ‘intimate’ distance (around one foot) the field of clear vision takes in the eyes, nostrils and mouth, and at the ‘personal’ distance extends to cover the whole face, and so on.68 _{We may assume that, by isolating a}

face or a part of it, close-up framing created a kind of surrogate field of vision anthropologically associated with, say, ‘intimate’ distance, thus forcibly imposing intimacy on the unprepared viewer. Hall’s chart shows that at this distance detail vision reveals the finest facial hairs and the smallest eye vessels— something that immediately makes us think of Swift’s complaint about the unbearable sight of the giantess’s skin as well as routine protests against the revolting details brought to us by the close-up (once again, the trompe-l’oeil quality of the image being the hardest obstacle to overcome). Furthermore, as proxemics demonstrates, there is an element of normality ‘built into’ our perception of sizes and distances. From more than 2 feet away we see the human head as being of ‘normal’ size, while at a closer distance we perceive its size as ‘over normal’. This may well be the norm responsible for facial close-ups being perceived as grotesquely out of proportion.

Again, however helpful to us this ongoing research in proxemics might seem to be, I wish to warn against applying proxemic categories too simplistically to the history of film reception, a field that perhaps calls for entirely different taxonomies of communication genres. Yet we should be aware that, just as the language of poetry is dependent on natural language, so must cinema be related to in-set visual and kinesthetic patterns of cultural behaviour.

Returning to the rejection of close-up by film critics of the 1910s, we should assume that the new cinematic proxemics was most probably measured against the proxemic norm of the theatre. This norm can be defined as a proxemic constant: for any given text (spectacle, concert, etc.) the distance between the spectator and the space where the event is taking place is a constant value. That this value is coded anew every time (by the price of the ticket, the size of the auditorium or other circumstances) is another matter, but, once given, the proximity of the viewer to the event remains the same. The early viewer brought a similar kind of assumption to the cinema, an assumption that was not challenged until the transformation of space-bound narration into the anthropocentric narrator system began to take place. To quote an exact definition given at the beginning of the 1920s by Alexander Arkatov, the great merit of this transformation was that it ‘replaced the man gesticulating and moving in space with “flying” spaces changing each other’.69 _{Indeed, the new system offered a different, mobile geometry of narrative space. The constancy of}

the viewing distance was no longer one of its axioms. As film directors started their experiments with framing, the former proxemic constant was turned into a variable value.

The new rules of the game were not easy to learn. Initially, the new construction of narrative space was perceived as its deconstruction. Barry Salt’s apt term ‘scene dissection’ reveals that the process involved a degree of violence; the old monolithic diegesis resisted intrusion.

Some early mentions of ‘enlarged images’ preserve this air of a dismantled system, of lost unity and integrity. How long did the period of transition last? Let me refer once again to the expression used in 1908 by Yuli Engel in describing a letter insert: ‘the letter…is actually shown on the screen separately.’70

Alongside other historically specific aspects discussed earlier in connection with this word, ‘separately’ shows that the insert was received as having lapsed out of the old system, without yet being recognised as part of a new system. The same expression was used in a similar context as late as 1917, the very year when the new narrative forms became firmly established,71 _{in a derogatory review of Sergei Veselovsky’s (or}

N.Arbatov’s) film Kings of the Stock Exchange [Tsari birzhi, 1916]: ‘The actors playing Velinsky and Nadya, badly made up around the eyes, often pull terrible faces. The director ought not to have fastened the audience’s attention on these grimaces, which are shown separately from the rest of the picture and much enlarged.’72 _{This does not sound just like criticism of a lack of continuity in editing; the critic is targeting}

close framing as such. Exactly as with inserts a decade earlier, the 1917 reviewer felt that close-ups simply did not cohere with the encompassing space.

Another difficulty presented by the new conception of narrative space was the mobile camera angle. In Engel’s phrase ‘shown separately’, it isn’t just the word ‘separately’ that sounds strange today; ‘shown’ is equally odd. Since the distance between the viewer and the object was now seen to be a variable value, the viewer had to learn that, paradoxically, it was not that the larger picture had been dismantled and that the close-up had been ‘served up’ for more detailed scrutiny, but the reverse: the viewer or, rather, his disembodied self was able to glide unnoticed within the space of the picture to a position nearer the object portrayed. In 1911 the critic Alexander Kosorotov, in an attempt to impart the effect of a close-up, where

‘a gigantic head suddenly filled the whole scene, with the slightest movement of the blood-vessels, the tiniest flickering of the eyes, the twitching of the lips, all startlingly clear’, described this device as ‘ripping the main moments out of the general scene and bringing them closer.’73

In this description you can sense that the new mode of narrative is perceived as the work of a maniacal showman destroying the diegesis in order to construct a story.