The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema

One of the earliest attempts to produce film theory, that of the French Impressionists in the 1920s, generated a concept—photogénie—which is usually considered to be theoretically incoherent. No doubt this is due to the fact that photogénie is designed to account for that which is inarticulable, that which exceeds language and hence points to the very essence of cinematic specificity. Photogénie names a supplementarity, an enhancement, that which is added to an object in the process of its subjection to a photographic medium. For Epstein, it is inextricably bound up with an ethics: “I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction” (Bonjour 20). The close-up is the privileged site for this experience of photogénie, and Epstein often labored to produce a language that would be adequate to this experience. Witness, for instance, the linguistic contortions in his description of the close-up of a face breaking into a smile: