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The close-up shot might be the cinema’s most nuanced instrument of expression, a humanizing technique that amplifies the emotive qualities of the actor’s face and promises viewers closeness with another human body. The close-up normalizes such contact, rendering conventional a familiarity often barred to us in everyday life.

Cinematic intimacy is, of course, a makeshift act of mimicry. At close range, the camera retains a capacity to apprehend detail that exceeds the scope of human perception. This prosthetic instrument mechanically facilitates our relation with the other. Walter Benjamin marks its invisible presence when he notes that the “film actor performs not in front of an audience but in front of an apparatus” (22), and one calibrated for testing. The close-up augments the subjective embrace of proximity with the distancing stance of objective examination. The camera does not visibly interpose itself in this scenario; rather, it is internalized in our own technologized gaze.

What makes a close-up “extreme”? The adjective asserts the unusual nature of this shot, and its severity. No surprise, then, that horror, science fiction and dystopian films carry the load in this barrage of images: the excessive gestures of each generic mode symbolize in bluntly material terms machine-body crises allowed only abstract representation in “realist” works. Blowing things out of proportion, genre films exploit the radical potential of disorientation in cinematic scale. Like Eisenstein, these films “are not afraid to use close-ups in films: to portray a man as he sometimes seems to us, out of natural proportions” (97). 

If the close-up can appear to disturb the complacent or even sadistic voyeurism of the spectator, confronting us with a returned gaze that often seems to peer directly at the apparatus, the extreme close-up dismantles the humanist politics of such a stably oppositional intersubjective encounter. In the XCU of the human eye in particular, the frame cuts so close as to disarticulate the face from any body that might subjectify and domesticate this eye. The gesture dis-organizes our own vision, stirring up involuntary somatic empathy, an abject touching. Enucleated, the eye does not return the gaze – it is Gaze. This sublime Eye that fills the screen is always our eye, a felt fact to which Dalí and Buñuel first gave indelible expression in Un Chien Andalou.

Animated by the videographic desire to dissect and analyze, our eye exam scrutinizes the close-up as keystone of identity for both species and medium. If the close-up is understood to reveal the internal life of human characters—and perhaps even the very “soul of the cinema” (Epstein, 236)—the confounding effect of the extreme close-up forestalls the turn to identity as a structure of “orientation.” Excoriated from the face, the disarticulated eyeball is the anthropomorphic projection of the estranged, abject gaze of science fiction, horror, and dystopian film. 

Enucleation likewise stands as a grotesque figure for the videographic drive to “pry the object from its shell,” carving terse clips out of intact narrative texts. The violence of Benjamin’s image suggests the audacity of a gesture that cannot be undone. Continuity editingstitches the sum of the body back together, making an art of synecdoche, where part and whole appear as expressions of each other. However, supercut logic irrevocably compromises bodily and narrative integrity, parading its collection of transplanted artifacts for our inspection. 

Every close-up is an index, at once performing and soliciting visual analysis of the detail. The gesture promises to enact “close reading” as something more than an abstract figure for hermeneutic interpretation. But a compilation of such shots begins to draw out the close-up’s inverse qualities, invoking the “distant reading” strategies emerging in the field of Audiovisual Material in Digital Humanities (AVinDH). In part, our video essay is a conversation with Bowdoin College’s Kinolab, a Digital Humanities project that attempts “the digital analysis of film language” by rendering the formal dimensions of film and television aesthetics into a language legible to the database, marked as tags and retrieved as keywords. Its creators recognize the way in which their data-formalism has been forged through a fraught metaphor that might amount to catachresis: as project director Allison Cooper puts it, “Early in Kinolab’s development, we confronted a tension between the expansive concept of film language and the need to define it methodically for computational purposes” (Porter, n.p.). This tension could only be deepened with the decision that a collection of close-ups should be the archive’s inaugural project; the essence of photogénie for film theorists such as Jean Epstein, the close-up has long stood as emblem of the ineffable qualities of cinematic expression. As a strategy of enhancement through extraction, the XCU of the human eye gives form to the ambivalent logic of the database, wherein distant reading enables close reading of generic figures.

Practically and stylistically, our video essay performs a medical procedure on the genre film corpus.  Presenting lines of enucleated eyeballs often under extreme duress, we extrapolate and conflate the premises of Buñuel’s signature slice, the perverse suture that fixes film’s reciprocal gaze. We open with an homage to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a film whose opening frame confronts viewers in an unblinking, cyclopean gaze that probes the boundaries between perceiving subject and its object. Replicating the Voight-Kampff test in dialogue with Un Chien Andalou, we insert our own eyeballs into the computing device, manufacturing a Frankenstein perspective from which we become spectators and distant readers of our own creation. Framed as picture-in-picture within a parade of tortured eyeballs, our self-enucleation gestures towards fan-based performances of erudition, but as index of our own internalized gaze, the XCU nullifies such autobiographical gesturing and forecloses against closed reading. Instead, our video’s form partakes in its hallmark technique’s extremity: XCU pursues the utmost proximity—and brevity. The film must blink, though rarely before the viewer does. The video draws its conclusion from Samuel Beckett’s Film; the extreme close-up of Buster Keaton’s paranoid eye reminds us that every film performs a VK test on its viewers.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” translated by Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room, vol. 39, spring 2010, pp. 11-39.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Synchronization of Senses,” The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leyda, Meridian, 1957, pp. 69-112.

Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” French Film: Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, vol. 1, edited by Richard Abel, translated by Stuart Liebman, Princeton UP, 1988, pp. 235-241.

Porter, Tom. “A Closer Look at the Close Up,” https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2023/02/a-closer-look-at-the-close-up.html). (Creating a Digital Archive of the Close-up in American Film and Television” Allison Cooper, https://kinolab.org/Research.php)