And so today begins the long-awaited Close-up Blog-a-Thon! I have my piece written already – I just need to tweak it, and get some screenshots – but man, have I been having fun reading everybody else’s pieces. Love it!!
Here’s a compilation of links, bloggers who are participating and their close-up posts.
And I have to say one additional thing about the Shamus’ beautiful post about John Wayne’s star-making close-up in Stagecoach. Read his thoughts on it – and then watch the clip. It’s wonderful how well he has described what it is that is so damn effective about that close-up. No wonder Wayne became a star.
The look on his face as the camera zooms in on him unevenly reminds me of the following quote from Peter Bogdonavich about Wayne:
To me, Duke had always seemed slightly out of breath, as though he hadn’t yet caught up on the last twenty years, not to mention the last twenty minutes. Both [John] Ford and [Howard] Hawks truly loved him, of course, and even knowing him a little, as I did, it was pretty difficult not to like him. All this, and a lot more, obviously communicated itself to the public — still the top American star more than seventy years since his beginning. His visual legacy has defined him as the archetypal man of the American West — bold, innocent, profane, idealistic, wrongheaded, good-hearted, single-minded, quick to action, not given to pretension, essentially alone, ready for any adventure — no matter how grand or daring; larger, finally, than life or death.
It’s that “out of breath” observation that seems so right ON to me … that is THERE, in that first stunning closeup.
These are great. I wonder if anybody’s going to do Jimmy Cagney in the rain from “Public Enemy”. That’s an image that’s been in my brainfile for fifty years.