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' These French tides refer, respectively, to the following films: Barker's The Aryan
(1916), A Si1ter of Six (1917), Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Dwan's Manhattan Madnm
(1916), Gance's Mater DoloroJa (1917), Sjiistrom's The Outlaw and hi1 Wife (1918), Dulac's
La Fite espagnole (1920), Stiller's Arne'1 Trea1ure (1919), and L'Herbier's L'Homme du large
(1920).
' The one-hundred-seat basement hall of the Grand Cafe on the boulevard des Capucines
was the site of the Lumiere brothers first public cinema screening, on 28 December 1895.
3 G. W. (Billy) Bitzer was Griffith's principal cameraman on Broken Blomm.r, as he had
been for the previous ten years or more; but Hendrik Sartov contributed most of the softfocus
close-ups in the film. L.-H. Burel, of course, was Gance's principal cameraman on
]'Accuie.
4 Lillian Gish (1896--) was best known for her roles in previous Griffith films, including
The Battle of Eldubu1h Gulch (1913), Home, Sweet Home (1914), Birth ofa Nation (1915),
Intolerance (1916), HeartJ of the World (1918), and True Heart Su1ie (1919). Donald Crisp
(1880--1974) was also best known as an actor in such films as Home, Sweet Home and Birth of
a Nation as well as a director of films such as Hi1 Sweetheart (1916). Richard Barthelmess
(1895-1963) became an important silent film star with his performance in Broken Blomm.r.
' During this period, the French generally thought ofInce and Griffith as the two master
filmmakers of the American cinema, the one (mistakenly) being considered the student of
the other. However, Ince was the producer and not the director of many of the films the
French associated with his name. Strangely, too, while most of Ince's films were shown in
France during the war, the films Griffith made between 1914 and 1918 were not shown
publicly there until after the war.
6 The source of this quote is uncertain. Cf. Germaine Dulac, "Chez D. W. Griffith,"
Cinia 7 (17 June 1921), I l-12.
' That the French were accepting Griffith's own self-aggrandizing testimony about how
he discovered and perfected most of the techniques crucial to the cinema can also be seen in
"La Realisation-Jes moyens d'expression," Cini-pour-tou1 55 (17 December 1920), 16.
JEAN EPSTEIN, "Magnification"
Reprinted, with changes, from a translation by Stuart Liebman in October 3 (Spring 1977),
!)-15, from "Grossissement," Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la sirene, 192 l), 93-108.
I WILL NEVER find the way to say how much I love American close-ups.
Point blank. A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to
face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity.
I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is anatomical. The decor of the
fifth act is this corner ofa cheek torn by a smile. Waiting for the moment
when 1 ,ooo meters ofintrigue converge in a muscular denouement satisfies
me more than the rest of the film. Muscular preambles ripple beneath the
skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A
breeze ofemotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the
face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the
fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is
laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance,
crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if
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slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the
lips.
The close-up is the soul of the cinema. It can be brief because the value
of the photogenic is measured in seconds. Ifit is too long, I don't find continuous
pleasure in it. Intermittent paroxysms affect me the way needles
do. Until now, I have never seen an entire minute ofpure photogenie. Therefore,
one must admit that the photogenic is like a spark that appears in fits
and starts. It imposes a decoupage a thousand times more detailed than
that of most films, even American ones. Mincemeat. Even more beautiful
than a laugh is the face preparing for it. I must interrupt. I love the mouth
which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesitates between
right and left, the recoil before the leap, and the moment before
landing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taut spring, the prelude, and
even more than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture. The
photogenic is conjugated in the future and in the imperative. It does not
allow for stasis.
I have never understood motionless close-ups. They sacrifice their essence,
which is movement. Like the hands of a watch, one of which is on
the hour and the other on the half hour, the legs of St. John the Baptist
create a temporal dissonance. Rodin or someone else explained it: in order
to create the impression ofmovement. A divine illusion? No, the gimmick
for a toy presented at the concours Lepine,1 and patented so that it can't be
used to make lead soldiers. It seemed to Rodin that Watteau's Cythera
could be animated by the movement of the eye from left to right over it.
The motorbike posters race uphill by means of symbols; hatching, hyphens,
blank spaces. Right or wrong, they thereby endeavor to conceal
their ankylosis. The painter and the sculptor maul life, but this bitch has
beautiful, real legs and escapes from under the nose of the artist crippled
by intertia. Sculpture and painting, paralyzed in marble or tied to canvas,
are reduced to pretence in order to capture the indispensable movement.
The ruses of reading. You must not maintain that art is created out of obstacles
and limits. You, who are lame, have made a cult ofyour crutch. The
cinema demonstrates your error. Cinema is all movement without any need
for stability or equilibrium. Of all the sensory logarithms of reality, the
photogenic is based on movement. Derived from time, it is acceleration. It
opposes the event to stasis, relationship to dimension. Gearing up and
gearing down. This new beauty is as sinuous as the curve of the stock market
index. It is no longer the function ofa variable but a variable itself.
The close-up, the keystone ofthe cinema, is the maximum expression of
this photogenie of movement. When static, it verges on contradiction. The
face alone doesn't unravel its expressions but the head and lens moving together
or apart, to the left and right ofeach other. Sharp focus is avoided.
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The landscape may represent a state of mind. It is above all a state. A
state of rest. Even those landscapes most often shown in documentaries of
picturesque Brittany or of a trip to Japan are seriously flawed. But "the
landscape's dance" is photogenic. Through the window ofa train or a ship's
porthole, the world acquires a new, specifically cinematic vivacity. A road
is a road but the ground which flees under the four beating hearts of an
automobile's belly transports me. The Oberland and Semmering tunnels
swallow me up, and my head, bursting through the roof, hits against their
vaults. Seasickness is decidedly pleasant. I'm on board the plummeting airplane.
My knees bend. This area remains to be exploited. I yearn for a
drama aboard a merry-go-round, or more modern still, on airplanes. The
fair below and its surroundings would be progressively confounded. Centrifuged
in this way, and adding vertigo and rotation to it, the tragedy
would increase its photogenic quality ten-fold. I would like to see a dance
shot successively from the four cardinal directions. Then, with strokes ofa
pan shot or ofa turning foot, the room as it is seen by the dancing couple.
An intelligent decoupage will reconstitute the double life of the dance by
linking together the viewpoints of the spectator and the dancer, objective
and subjective, ifl may say so. When a character is going to meet another,
I want to go along with him, not behind or in front of him or by his side,
but in him. I would like to look through his eyes and see his hand reach
out from under me as ifit were my own; interruptions ofopaque film would
imitate the blinking ofour eyelids.
One need not exclude the landscape but adapt it. Such is the case with a
film I've seen, Souvenir d'ete aStockholm. Stockholm didn't appear at all.
Rather, male and female swimmers who had probably not even been asked
for their permission to be filmed. People diving. There were kids and old
people, men and women. No one gave a damn about the camera and had a
great time. And so did I! A boat loaded with strollers and animation. Elsewhere
people fished. A crowd watched. I don't remember what show the
crowd was waiting for; it was difficult to move through these groups. There
were cafe terraces. Swings. Races on the grass and through the reeds.
Everywhere, men, life, swarms, truth.
That's what must replace the Pathecolor newsreel where I always look
for the words "Bonne Fete" written in golden letters at the corner of the
screen.2
But the closeup must be introduced, or else one deliberately handicaps
the style. Just as a stroller leans down to get a better look at a plant, an
insect, or a pebble, in a sequence describing a field the lens must include
close-ups of a flower, a fruit, or an animal: living nature. I never travel as
solemnly as these cameramen. I look, I sniff at things, I touch. Close-up,
close-up, close-up. Not the recommended points of view, the horizons of
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the Touring Club, but natural, indigenous, and photogenic details. Shop
windows, cafes, quite wretched urchins, a cashier, ordinary gestures made
with their full capacity for realization, a fair, the dust of automobiles, an
atmosphere.
The landscape film is, for the moment, a big zero. People look for the
picturesque in chem. The picturesque in cinema is zero, nothing, negation.
About the same as speaking ofcolors co a blind man. The film is susceptible
only co photogenie. Picturesque and photogenic coincide only by
chance. All the worthless films shoe near the Promenade des Anglais {in
Nice} proceed from chis confusion. Their sunsets are further proofof chis.
Possibilities are already appearing for the drama of the microscope, a
hystophysiology of the passions, a classification of the amorous sentiments
into chose which do and chose which do not need Gram's solucion.3 Young
girls will consult chem instead of the fortune teller. While we are waiting,
we have an initial sketch in the close-up. It is nearly overlooked, not because
it errs, but because it presents a ready-made style, a minute dramaturgy,
flayed and vulnerable. The amplifying close-up demands underplaying.
It's opposed co the cheater where everything is loudly declaimed. A
hurricane ofmurmurs. An interior conviction lifts the mask. It's not about
interpreting a role; what's important is the actor's belief in his character,
right up co the point where a character's absent-mindedness becomes chat
of the actor himself. The director suggests, then persuades, then hypnotizes.
The film is nothing but a relay between the source of nervous energy
and the auditorium which breaches its radiance. That is why the gestures
which work best on screen are nervous gestures.
It is paradoxical, or rather extraordinary, chat the nervousness which
often exaggerates reactions should be photogenic when the screen deals
mercilessly with the lease forced gestures. Chaplin has created the overwrought
hero. His entire performance consists of the reflex actions of a
nervous, tired person. A bell or an automobile horn makes him jump,
forces him co stand anxiously, his hand on his chest, because of the nervous
palpitations of his heart. This isn't so much an example, but rather a synopsis
of his photogenic neurasthenia. The first time chat I saw Nazimova
agitated and exothermic, living through an incense childhood, I guessed
chat she was Russian, chat she came from one of the most nervous peoples
on earth. And the little, short, rapid, spare, one might say involuntary,
gestures ofLillian Gish who runs like the hand ofa chronometer! The hands
ofLouise Glaum unceasingly drum a tune ofanxiety. Mae Murray, Buster
Keaton. Etc.4
The close-up is drama in high gear. A man says, "I love the faraway princess."
Here the verbal gearing down is suppressed. I can see love. It half
lowers its eyelids, raises the arc of the eyebrows laterally, inscribes itselfon
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the taut forehead, swells the masseters, hardens the tuft ofthe chin, flickers
on the mouth and at the edge of the nostrils. Good lighting; how distant
the faraway princess is. We're not so delicate that we must be presented
with the sacrifice ofIphigenia recounted in alexandrines. We are different.
We have replaced the fan by the ventilator and everything else accordingly.
We demand to see because of our experimental mentality, because of our
desire for a more exact poetry, because of our analytic propensity, because
we need to make new mistakes.
The close-up is an intensifying agent because ofits size alone. Ifthe tenderness
expressed by a face ten times as large is doubtlessly not ten times
more moving, it is because in this case, ten, a thousand, or a hundred thousand
would-erroneously-have a similar meaning. Merely being able to
establish twice as much emotion would still have enormous consequences.
But whatever its numerical value, this magnification acts on one's feelings
more to transform than to confirm them, and personally, it makes me uneasy.
Increasing or decreasing successions ofevents in the right proportions
would obtain effects ofan exceptional and fortunate elegance. The close-up
modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I
stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes
of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has
a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I
follow it face to face. It's not even true that there is air between us; I consume
it. It is in me like a sacrament. Maximum visual acuity.
The close-up limits and directs the attention. As an emotional indicator,
it overwhelms me. I have neither the right nor the ability to be distracted.
It speaks the present imperative of the verb to understand. Just as petroleum
potentially exists in the landscape that the engineer gropingly
probes, the photogenic and a whole new rhetoric are similarly concealed in
the close-up. I haven't the right to think ofanything but this telephone. It
is a monster, a tower, and a character. The power and scope of its whispering.
Destinies wheel about, enter, and leave from this pylon as if from an
acoustical pigeon house. Through this nexus flows the illusion of my will,
a laugh that I like or a number, an expectation or a silence. It is a sensory
limit, a solid nucleus, a relay, a mysterious transformer from which everything
good or bad may issue. It has the air ofan idea.
One can't evade an iris. Round about, blackness; nothing to attract one's
attention.
This is cyclopean art, a unisensual art, an iconoscopic retina. All life and
attention are in the eye. The eye sees nothing but a face like a great sun.
Hayakawa aims his incandescent mask like a revolver. Wrapped in darkness,
ranged in the cell-like seats, directed toward the source ofemotion by
their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge, as ifin
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a funnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer
valid. Even the music to which one is accustomed is nothing but additional
anesthesia for whatever is not visual. It takes away our ears the way a Valda
lozenge takes away our sense of taste. A cinema orchestra need not simulate
sound effects. Let it supply a rhythm, preferably a monotonous one. One
cannot listen and look at the same time. Ifthere is a dispute, sight, as the
most developed, the most specialized, and the most generally popular
sense, always wins. Music which attracts attention or the imitation of
noises is simply disturbing.
Although sight is already recognized by everyone as the most developed
sense, and even though the viewpoint ofour intellect and our mores is visual,
there has nevertheless never been an emotive process so homogeneously,
so exclusively optical as the cinema. Truly, the cinema creates a particular
system ofconsciousness limited to a single sense. And after one has grown
accustomed to using this new and extremely pleasant intellectual state, it
becomes a sort of need, like tobacco or coffee. I have my dose or I don't.
Hunger for a hypnosis far more intense than reading offers, because reading
modifies the functioning of the nervous system much less.
The cinematic feeling is therefore particularly intense. More than anything
else, the close-up releases it. Although we are not dandies, all of us
are or are becoming blase. Art takes to the warpath. To attract customers,
the circus showman must improve his acts and speed up his carousel from
fair to fair. Being an artist means to astonish and excite. The habit ofstrong
sensations, which the cinema is above all capable ofproducing, blunts theatrical
sensations which are, moreover, of a lesser order. Theater, watch
out!
Ifthe cinema magnifies feeling, it magnifies it in every way. Its pleasure
is more pleasurable, but its defects are more glaring.
)EAN EPSTEIN (1897-1953) came to France from Poland in 1908 and became a student
of medicine and philosophy in Lyon, where he worked initially as a laboratory assistant to
the Lumiere brothers. Through Blaise Cendrars, he went to Paris to become an editor at
Editions de la sirene and begin writing on the cinema. He worked briefly as an assistant for
Louis Delluc and Marcel L'Herbier and then directed his first film for Jean Benoit-Levy, a
feature-length fictionalized documentary, Pasteur (l922).
' The concours Lepine: an exhibition fair for inventors held annually in Paris-TRANS.
' Georges Sadoul has suggested that Epstein is here referring to film images stylized in
the manner of picture postcards-Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, vol. 5 (Paris: Denoel,
1975), l 35. Epstein may also be referring to the practice of early film companies who inscribed
their trademark emblem on the theatrical sets or inserted placards bearing such emblems
into shots taken outdoors to prevent pirating of their prints.-TRANS.
3 Gram's solution: a solution used in the differential staining ofbacteria.-TRANS.
4 Louise Glaum (1894-?) was best known for starring in the William S. Hart westerns,
The Aryan (1916) and Hell's Hinges (1916), both directed by Reginald Barker. In the late
l9IOS and early 1920s, she starred in a popular series of"vamp" films. Mae Murray (1889-