Close-up Quotes
It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.
Maria Callas
..the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.
Fernand Léger
I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinema's only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalize it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself [quote of c. 1927].
Fernand Léger
In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker's face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.
William S. Burroughs
Yes. Women characters are once again assuming significance in films. Karan Johar, Sanjay Bhansali and Yash uncle conceive wonderful women characters. In the '50s and '60s, Bimal Roy and Guru Duttji wrote beautiful roles for heroines. You couldn't take your eyes off a close-up of Waheedaji, Nargisji, Nutanji or Meenaji. Times are changing again. The Bhansali-shot close-ups of Ash and Madhuri in Devdas were awesome.
Rani Mukerji
I remember so vividly playing a scene with Jimmy Stewart. I was in the back of a covered wagon, and we were doing this little talk in the wilderness. They did his close-up first. I was looking at him and thinking, 'How does he do that?' He is not 'doing' anything, and yet everything is there.
Julie Adams
Beside my own intense, multiple impressions of him, I also had to contend with his 'world image' created by the endless newspaper photographs, TV appearances, caricatures. Realizing this, I began to collect hundreds of photographs torn from newspapers and magazines and never missed an opportunity to draw him when he appeared on TV. These snapshots covered every angle, from above, below, profile, back, standing, sitting, walking, close-up, off in the distance. I particularly liked tiny shots where the features were indistinct yet unmistakable. Covering my walls with my own sketches and these photographs, I worked from canvas to canvas (the smallest 2 feet high, the largest, 11) always striving for a composite image.
Elaine de Kooning
Believe me, I am still very surprised that I managed to make that film [Close-Up]. When I actually look back on that film, I really feel that I was not the director but instead just a member of the audience. Because the film made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.
Abbas Kiarostami
Sometimes you're watching a great film actor, and if you stand 10 feet away from them, you're like, "God, they're terrible. They're not doing anything." And then you see the close-up and it's so nuanced and so much expression is happening. They were acting for that camera and for no one else.
Finn Wittrock
