Word: closeups
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...Night, Reign of Terror, Border Incident and Devil's Doorway - are unlike any other noirs in their visual density and tonal texture. Like many movies in the genre, these are indebted to the look that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland created for Citizen Kane: chiaroscuro lighting, characters in extreme closeup or long shot, and plenty of low-angle shots. Alton pushed these tenets further than most. He shot even the sitting figures from below, with the tops of rooms pressing down on them; he loved ceiling shots more than Japanese tourists in the Sistine Chapel. This perspective not only enhanced...
...McCarthy notes, Alton liked to throw whatever light he needed on a back wall, leaving the actors as foreground shadows. Sometimes the only thing visible in a closeup is the white of a man's eyes, or the moisture in a woman's. The enveloping shadows reduce the visual information, isolate elements to which the audience's attention can be directed. In Raw Deal, Alton's closeups of Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt manage to catch a cross of light in the left eye of each actress, and another glistening cross in their earrings. Later, to show that time...
...begins with the closeup of an old lady's craggy face. Pull back a little, and see she is wearing a nun's wimple; back a bit more, and discover that she is buried up to her neck on the beach. Cut to the image of a pretty, sad-eyed young woman who's nearly run over by a bus. Then to shots of a girls' volleyball game, their grace and strength italicized by being filmed in slow motion. All this to Antony and the Johnsons' "My Lady Story," a dreamy-sounding, gentle massage of a ballad with scalpel-sharp...
...Lockdown USA, by Michael Skolnik and Rebecca Chaiklin, follows the crusade of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and others to get Governor George Pataki and the state legislatures to change those laws. It?s a closeup lesson in political compromise - or, as many supporters of change see it, the humiliating status quo. "The Right, they?re calling it a jail break," says Simmons, while the Left, "they want total repeal." An hour into the film, Pataki and Simmons do cut a deal, but one that reduces the penalty from 15 to 9 years and still doesn?t allow judges...
...ULLMANN: Yes. When he writes, he knows more or less what he's getting. But there can still be surprises. The last scene in Saraband,, where I'm behind a table with all these photographs, I thought would be an incredible closeup where I would do some big-time acting. And it wasn't that at all. I asked him, "Why am I doing this?" He just said, "Do it and see what happens." He usually sits by the camera, but this time he didn't. He was sitting in a corner of the big room; we didn't even...