英文摘要 |
While the question of realism in the cinema has traditionally hinged on either the indexicality of the photographic image and sound or generic conventions which produce an effect of the “real,” the issue of scale and its relation to a sense of either the real or the unreal has remained largely unexamined. Amidst the euphoria of the digital and a whole host of new technologies of representation—high definition television, video, cell phone photography, virtual reality—scale has re-emerged as one of the primary markers of cinematic specificity (along with the collective theatrical experience). The cinema today reasserts its property of being “larger than life,” of providing a performance of sheer magnification, of surrounding and absorbing its spectator. In this paper, I am interested in investigating the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale as well as the scale of the shot have figured in the negotiation of the human body's relation to space in modernity. Using a variety of films from the earliest cinema to the cinemascope rage of the 1950s and beyond, I look at scale from two points of view. First, I investigate the question of cinematic scale through the problematic of shot size—the classifications of close-up, medium shot, long shot. For Jean Mitry, scale becomes the primary measure of the cinema’s ability to penetrate and organize space, through close-ups, medium shots, and long shots (which are, ultimately, entirely arbitrary as distinctions). Scale becomes distinctive of the cinematic project internally, as the regulator of the organization of space in relation to a body that is invited, in some sense, to inhabit the diegesis. Second, scale is also instanciated by screen size, by attempts to regularize aspect ratio, by experiments with split screen and cinemascope, etc. The notion of a “larger than life” cinema has always operated as both lure and threat. The social, political, and cultural ramifications of the spectacle and monumentality in modernity and their relation to the conceptualization of the real are at stake here. |