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Bigger Than Life
The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema
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Book Presentation:
In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure 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 regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, "immersing" them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.
About the Author:
Mary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive and Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis.
Press Reviews:
"Matching her earlier, masterful treatment of cinematic time, Mary Ann Doane here offers a brilliant probing of cinematic space. She explores cinema’s dynamic use of scale, from the magnification of the face in close-up to new screen technologies ranging from the iPhone to IMAX. Drawing on a range of film styles and practices, including early cinema, avant-garde experiments, and Shanghai cinema of the 1930s, Doane reveals how cinema has shaped a modern abstract and even dematerialized world." - Tom Gunning, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago
"Mary Ann Doane’s highly innovative, theoretically brilliant, and eloquently incisive consideration of the history of the filmic close-up and its relation to scale will undoubtedly make Bigger Than Life a field-changing work." - Maggie Hennefeld, author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes
"Bigger Than Life opens with a unique and crucial examination of the history and historiography of the close-up, its conclusion offers a look at cinema in its biggest and most impactful forms, even cinema beyond cinema itself – this is where Doane’s work becomes truly colossal."
- Harrison Whitaker, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Bigger Than Life’s wide-ranging interrogation of its subject makes for a thrilling and rewarding read. [It] is altogether awe-inspiring and overwhelming in ways appropriate to its subject, constituting an important meditation on the dialogue between new and old media."
- Alicia Byrnes, Film-Philosophy
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
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