Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

Bigger Than Life examines how cinema's scalar operations, particularly close-ups, disrupt and reshape the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation, tracing their history from early cinema to contemporary digital technology. Early close-ups were seen as grotesque and horrifying, but today's large-scale technologies aim to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, creating a crisis of location and reconceptualizing position, scale, and distance. This has shaped the modern subject, blurring the boundaries between commodification and subjectivity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 08 April 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Bigger Than Life by Mary Ann Doane explores the impact of scalar operations in cinema, particularly the close-up, on the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences viewed the close-up as grotesque and horrifying, seeking to expose a character's interiority through magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound aim to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, immersing them in image and sound. The concept of immersion is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. Cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, intertwining them with the incessant expansion of commodification.

Weight: 596g
Dimension: 156 x 234 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478014485