VLVL2 (10) Mute soliloquies, 195

[Paul Nightingale]

(195.5-6) "They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal
and devastate."

>From Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film (1952, page refs to Mast and Cohen eds,
Film Theory and Criticism, 1974):

"By means of the close-up, the camera in the days of the silent film
revealed also the hidden mainsprings of a life which we had thought we
already knew so well. Blurred outlines are mostly the result of our
insensitive shortsightedness and superficiality. We skim over the teeming
substance of life. The camera has discovered that cell-life of the vital
issues in which all great events are ultimately conceived; for the greatest
landslide is only the aggregate of the movements of single particles. A
multitude of c lose-ups can show us the very instant in which the general is
transformed into the particular. The close-up has not only widened our
vision of life, it has also deepened it" (185).

[...]

(195.6-8) "When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into
the most sensitive memory device, the human face."

"In the film the mute soliloquy of the face speaks even when the hero is not
alone, and herein lies a new great opportunity for depicting man ...

"The film, especially the sound film, can separate the words of a character
talking to others from the mute play of features by means of which, in the
middle of such a conversation, we are made to hear a mute soliloquy and
realise the difference between this soliloquy and the audible conversation
...

"A novelist can, of course, write a dialogue so as to weave into it what the
speakers think to themselves while they are talking. But by doing so he
splits up the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but always awe-inspiring,
unity between spoken word and hidden thought with which this contradiction
is rendered manifest in the human face and which the film was the first to
show us in all its dazzling variety" (Balazs, 190-191).

(195.17-19) "And here came Frenesi Gates's reverse shot ... Frenesi's eyes,
even on the ageing ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue
unfadable."

Apart from anything else, this begs the question, why a reverse shot?