“The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literatureis totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a smallthing indeed, but it makes fora notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.”
