Sightlines · a concept

affection image

feeling held in the interval, before action; home is the close-up/face.

On screen: the close-up; a feeling registered but not yet discharged into action

Persona (1966) — Faces held past expression, filling the frame against black; the merged half-faces of Alma and Elisabeth as the affection-image pushed to crisis.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — The entire film is built from extreme close-ups of the face on panchromatic stock without makeup; feeling registers but never discharges into action because Joan is chained and powerless — Deleuze's…
The Birth of a Nation (1915) — The iris and soft-focus close-up isolate Lillian Gish's restrained, reflecting face — a feeling held before discharge, the icon of a besieged innocence.
The Kid (1921) — Close-ups appear rarely and are reserved for the child's face and the mother's grief; after an hour of full-figure middle distance ('comedy in long shot'), the cut to Coogan howling with his arms out…
La Roue (1923) — Extreme close-ups of the non-human — connecting rods, pistons, valve gear, gauge dials, rail rims — given the same scale and duration as Sisif's eyes; photogénie in its most literal form, extending…
Pandora's Box (1929) — Brooks framed in close and medium shots so micro-expression carries meaning before any act
City Lights (1931) — The final close-up on the Tramp's face — terror, hope, and tenderness registering with no action available to discharge them; Chaplin's one deviation from full-body framing
Dishonored (1931) — Dietrich's face held in close-up registering composure that never discharges into action; she perceives constantly but acts almost never
Frankenstein (1931) — Karloff's face under Pierce's makeup registers wonder, confusion, fear and grief but is rarely allowed to discharge into action; the lakeside scene with Maria runs entirely on feeling held before it…
Limite (1931) — Extreme close-ups isolate a sewing-machine needle, a wrist, a mouth, a length of rope, a shoe on gravel; faces are cropped, turned away, or withheld, so feeling is carried by fragments rather than…
Shanghai Express (1932) — The close-up registers feeling without discharging it into action; von Sternberg holds on the face and retards the plot so affection, not action, governs the image.
Duck Soup (1933) — Harpo's Pinky as pure anarchic pantomime — scissors, horn, childlike malice — affect and impulse operating below language, per Deleuze's mapping of the brothers onto his image-types
Rebecca (1940) — Fontaine's face "turns timidity into a sustained dramatic register: flinching, apologetic" — a reflecting face registering displacement without discharging it into action, dwarfed by the staircase…
Mrs. Miniver (1942) — The raid rendered through faces, using the lighting program Wyler developed on The Letter: light modulating 'a face that refuses to release emotion.'
Now, Voyager (1942) — Polito's shift from shadowed, edge-of-frame Charlotte to luminous frontal glamour close-ups; the camera holds feeling in the interval before any action ('the camera enacts the cure')
Gilda (1946) — Maté's Dreyer-trained close-ups holding Hayworth's face, soft-edged and isolated from the noir dark, feeling registered but not discharged
Black Narcissus (1947) — Cardiff's near-theatrical close-up of Ruth's reddened face in the climactic sequence — a feeling held in isolation, not yet discharged into action
Odd Man Out (1947) — Faces held in low key, lit from below or raked so eye sockets go black; and Lukey, the half-mad painter who wants to capture the look of a dying man's eyes — a character explicitly chasing the image…
They Live by Night (1949) — Diskant's noir vocabulary — hard side-light, deep shadow, faces half-erased — is applied to lovers at rest rather than to interrogations, registering feeling that has nowhere to discharge into action.
A Place in the Sun (1951) — The telephoto romantic close-ups of Clift and Taylor, depth compressed so two faces fill one plane — feeling registered before it discharges into action
Sudden Fear (1952) — Crawford's near-silent discovery scene, her face isolated in fields of black by Lang, registering feeling before it can become action
Summer with Monika (1953) — Andersson's face held in extended close-up throughout — Bergman here discovers 'the human face held long enough to become a landscape in its own right,' registering feeling that never discharges into…
Godzilla (1954) — Akihiko Hirata's Serizawa, eyepatched and withdrawn, a performance 'built on suppression' where the horror is in what he will not say about his discovery — an intensity registered and refused…
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) — The blank, unfinished duplicate on the billiard table and in the greenhouse — a face with every feature and no feeling; the film's horror is the close-up emptied of the quality it exists to hold
Il Grido (1957) — Feeling registers on Cochran's immobile face and in small gestures but never discharges into an act; the only discharge in the film is Irma's scream at the close, after Aldo falls from the refinery…
Wild Strawberries (1957) — Sjöström's face in close-up, the final shore vision depending on micro-modulations of jaw and eyes rather than melodrama
Mon Oncle (1958) — The Villa Arpel façade at night, its two round upstairs windows lit with the Arpels' heads moving in them like pupils: a face produced in a static wide shot rather than a close-up, so the house…
The Magician (1958) — The title Ansiktet ('The Face'); von Sydow near-mute, his upper face masked by shadow with eyes reduced to glints, the held close-up registering a withheld quality rather than discharging into action
Pickpocket (1959) — Bresson fragments the body into wrist, pocket, exchanged wallet and holds on charged part-objects (banknote, newspaper, clasp) instead of expressive faces, displacing feeling onto the hands.
Devi (1960) — Sharmila Tagore plays Doya almost entirely through stillness, gesture and the eyes: terror and creeping self-doubt register on her face with no action available to discharge them, because the…
Eyes Without a Face (1960) — the mask as the film's central object: a feeling registered but never discharged into action, held suspended on a face that cannot move
A Woman Is a Woman (1961) — Angéla's demand for a baby is never discharged into an action; Legrand's score swells as if to launch a number and is guillotined by a cut to silence, leaving the feeling registered with nowhere to…
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) — Nykvist holds extreme close-ups of Harriet Andersson's face through 'states of waiting, recognition, and terror' — feeling registered in the face but not discharged into action.
Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) — The close-up held on faces through O'Neill's arias — feeling registered with nowhere to discharge into action.
The Miracle Worker (1962) — Caparrós's close, unglamorous framing that repeatedly isolates the physical business of finger-spelling, grasping and resisting; the hand, not the face, as the unit that registers feeling before it…
The Silence (1963) — Nykvist's sustained close-ups held 'past narrative function,' transforming the face into a landscape that must be read rather than decoded through dialogue
Winter Light (1963) — The seven-minute unbroken close-up of Marta reading her letter, her face held in flat light with no reaction shot and no score to discharge the feeling.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) — The extreme close-up used 'not for psychological revelation but as formal intensification' — feeling registered but not yet discharged into action
Charulata (1964) — Madhabi Mukherjee registers boredom, dawning love, guilt and desolation on her face, often with no dialogue to discharge the feeling into action.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) — Close-ups of weathered non-professional faces as the film's primary expressive unit — feeling registered but not discharged into action
A Man and a Woman (1966) — Aimée photographed on long focal lengths as watchful and slightly withheld, her warmth always shadowed — a reflecting face holding a single quality that is never discharged into action.
How to Steal a Million (1966) — The broom-closet scenes: two people jammed into a space too small for the frame, the anamorphic 2.35:1 width filled by proximity rather than depth — faces pulled loose from their spatial coordinates…
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) — Delli Colli's 'extreme close-ups of eyes, gun hands, trigger fingers, and sweat-dampened faces'—feeling held in the face, not yet discharged into the draw
The War Game (1966) — Faces shot in tight, unflattering close-up, and the dazed children's faces in the closing passages — non-professionals directed toward states rather than characterizations, so the feeling registers…
Le Samouraï (1967) — The opening: minutes on Delon motionless in gray half-light, a feeling registered but never discharged into action
Mouchette (1967) — Close, partial framings privilege hands, feet and fragments over expressive faces; feeling registers on the model's neutral surface without discharging into action.
Faces (1968) — Al Ruban's handheld camera presses into tight, unflattering close-up on pores, sweat and 'the small muscular betrayals of people performing emotions they don't feel' — a feeling registered but never…
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) — Extreme wide-angle close-ups turning faces into landscape; Fonda's contact lenses removed so the blue registers — micro-movements building intensity across a held face at a threshold.
Klute (1971) — Lerner's sustained close work on Fonda's face keeps her expression legible, registering feeling (guardedness, revelation) held in duration rather than discharged into action.
The Touch (1971) — The close-up registering feeling not yet discharged into action — Karin's wonder and dread at what she is becoming
Cries and Whispers (1972) — Nykvist's extreme close-ups fill the frame with faces, eliminating spatial context; a feeling is registered on the face (Agnes's eyes that cannot close) without discharging into action
Sambizanga (1973) — Maldoror renders revolution through saturated close-ups of faces rather than gunfire; feeling registered but not yet acted
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) — Long lenses isolate Rowlands' face and hold past comfort — feeling registered in drifting close-ups but never discharged into action
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) — Oates plays Bennie in cheap sunglasses, a face blocked from reflecting; his scene partner is a severed head, a face with nothing behind it. Addressing it aloud as 'Al' has him supplying both halves…
Phantom of the Paradise (1974) — After his disfigurement Winslow wears the helmet-and-cape Phantom rig; feeling is registered permanently on a metal surface that can never discharge into expression.
Scenes from a Marriage (1974) — The camera holds on faces past the conventional cutting point, sometimes minutes at a time, registering feeling that never discharges into action
Autumn Sonata (1978) — Nykvist's extreme close-ups held long past the conventional cut, lit with soft window light so a feeling registers on skin before it discharges into any act
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) — Brooke Adams registering the earliest, most intimate horror as she senses her own partner has been replaced: the face intact as surface, empty of the held feeling the close-up exists to carry.
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) — Nykvist's mugshot-tight frontal close-ups with backgrounds dropping into black, faces held past comfort registering feeling that never discharges — the Dreyer/Joan of Arc technique repurposed as…
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — E.T. has no conventional dialogue and must communicate through close-up expression and gesture — feeling registered but not discharged into action.