Word: closeups
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life in the Harem. Anyone who participated actively in the early New Deal will no doubt be fascinated by Ickes' closeup view of its harem-like bureaucracy between 1933 and 1936. As a combination court favorite and whipping boy, Ickes had a magnificent opportunity to observe his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, at work and at play, and the diary faithfully reports his intimate relationship with the President. But the Ickes of the caustic quotes and belligerent campaign speeches emerges only occasionally; like most diarists, the author was simply writing a detailed and essentially formless account of his daily life...
...shown, at least half are contrived rather than documentary. Tana Hoban used a professional model for her sun-splashed shot of a little girl. Its lighting is reminiscent of the impressionistic paintings of Renoir et al., and its atmosphere is that of a powder puff. Aaron Siskind's closeup of peeling paint is not supposed to look like paint alone; it is a faintly sinister pattern reminiscent of easel pictures by the German surrealist Max Ernst. Arnold Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky is heavily symbolic: its main feature is not Stravinsky, but a piano top photographed...
...directed by John (Seven Days to Noon) Boulting, photographed in Technicolor by Jack (Red Shoes) Cardiff, and adapted by Eric Ambler from Ray Allister's Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor. The result is a cinebiography that is more of a blurred long shot than a clear closeup...
...picture, Achtung Banditi (Beware of Bandits). Wrote De Boccard: "The only thing of any continuity [in the picture] consists of [Gina's] breasts . . . Those breasts, which appear ... to be rather praiseworthy, are presented in all possible ways, in long shots, medium shots, close-up and very closeup, and to give them particular prominence, they have been subjected to a perpetual trembling and wavering . . ." In his agitation, De Boccard failed to mention that Gina was properly clothed...
There are two such scenes, and they are magnificent. The camera moves hectically from ringside to closeup--pausing now to depict a face reeling under the blows of a blurred glove, a kidney being jabbed, or an eye being gouged, then jumping to the front-row seats for a glimpse of Callan's anguished trainers, and returning to the bout again. Long experience in shooting fights has taught moviemakers how to film such scenes with maximum effectiveness...