The Promise of Cinema by Kaes Anton; Baer Nicholas; Cowan Michael

Author:Kaes, Anton; Baer, Nicholas; Cowan, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

In this final section of their thirty-one-page booklet, Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas draw heavily on the work of Béla Balázs to praise the erotic pleasures of cinema, especially through the technique of the close-up. They quote at length from the section of Visible Man on Asta Nielsen—a section that Balázs had adapted from his article on Nielsen included in chapter 4 (no. 51). Much like the model of “film illusion” in a previous article (no. 151), the authors’ paean to the pleasures of magnified female body parts here looks forward to the psychoanalytic theory of Laura Mulvey, who drew on Freud to characterize fetishistic scopophilia as a means of assuaging male castration anxiety by isolating an object in close-up and “transforming it into something satisfying in itself.”1 Mulvey associated fetishistic scopophilia with the cult of female stars, and above all with the work of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich.

The close-up is the director’s index finger. If he wishes to say, “Look at what beautiful legs Anny Ondra has,”2 he places the camera so close to the diva that we see only her legs. An elegant and charming smile or a laugh full of zest for life becomes more intense when the face extends over the entire screen. The Russians have gone even further, placing the lens so close to the object that only a part of the face appears in the picture. One cannot express the idleness of a rich landowner more monumentally than by a showing the thick rolls of fat on the back of his neck, along with a few furrows in the skin appearing as deep as Alpine valleys. Here we have a new perspective—man under the microscope—that allows nothing repulsive to remain hidden. In the French film La Glace à trois faces [The three-sided mirror],3 the camera is mounted right onto the hood of an automobile. It captures the dangers of a race by showing nothing but the driver’s eyes peering out anxiously and his mouth, which, for all its resolute will power, nonetheless twitches with fear. Here, too, film has a revelatory function.

The close-up has inaugurated a new epoch in feminine beauty. It is probably not an exaggeration to ascribe the majority of film’s erotic effects to good close-ups; this is more plausible than, for example, attributing eroticism to those indescribably monotone scenes of bars and revues, by which so many filmmakers with no talent for mise-en-scène think they can create the illusion of a whirlwind of high life or indescribably fashionable orgies. Confetti, streamers, the gleam of saxophones, parades of show girls, couples dancing, musicians going wild to accelerated rhythms—we have seen all of this repeated ad nauseam. Similarly, the madness of images alternating at lightning speed represents a deliberate method, and this method has unfortunately become all too transparent. But when Brigitte Helm’s beautiful countenance single-handedly overwhelms us with its uncannily sharp, austere profile and its clear eyes, or when we see Greta Garbo’s touchingly distressed, pouting mouth, which, together with

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