The close up, and the face as landscape
A face six metres high, held for several seconds, in front of an audience that cannot look away. No previous technology had done anything like it, and the professions that formed around it are still with us.
Cinema made the human face enormous, sustained and public in a way no earlier medium had. Early film stock was orthochromatic and required heavy corrective makeup, which changed decisively when panchromatic stock and incandescent lighting were adopted in the later 1920s. Studio makeup departments professionalised the work, most visibly through Max Factor's business in Los Angeles. The close-up is often credited to a single director, but close shots appear in films by several makers from the earliest years, and the attribution is contested.
The technical description of a close up is dull: a shot in which the subject fills most of the frame. The experiential description is not. A face projected at architectural scale, held longer than social convention permits anyone to stare, examined by an audience sitting in the dark, is an object without precedent. Portraiture never did it. Theatre could not do it, because the back of the stalls is thirty metres from the actor. It arrived, fully formed in its strangeness, within about fifteen years of the invention of cinema.
Who invented it, and why the question is a trap
Popular accounts credit D. W. Griffith. Film historians have spent a long time disassembling that claim, and the disassembly is instructive because it is a model of how attribution works in cultural history.
Close shots of faces and objects appear in films made well before Griffith's major work, including in British and French production of the earliest period. What is defensible is a narrower statement: that the integration of close shots into a continuity system, in which shot scale is used systematically to control attention and emotion within an edited sequence, developed across the 1910s in the work of many people, and that Griffith was a prominent and influential practitioner of it. The single inventor story survives because it is easier to tell and because Griffith actively promoted it.
- The claim
- D. W. Griffith invented the close-up.
- Where it appears to come from
- Griffith and his publicists made large claims for his innovations, including in press advertising, and early histories of cinema written in the 1920s and 1930s repeated them. The claim entered general reference works and has been extremely durable.
- What is actually established
- Established: close shots of faces and objects exist in films predating Griffith's feature work, including in British films of around 1900 and in early French production. Established: the systematic use of shot scale within continuity editing developed across the 1910s among many filmmakers, and Griffith was influential in it. Not established: invention by any individual. Film historians have documented earlier instances repeatedly, and the attribution persists chiefly through inertia.
The stock problem, and what makeup had to do about it
Early cinema inherited the emulsion limitations described in the essay on photography, and then made them worse by adding enormous magnification and harsh light.
Orthochromatic film could not see red. Under arc lighting, an unmade face photographed as a mask of blotches, with lips reading as black holes and every vein and freckle darkened. The theatrical greasepaints available were designed for stage distance and looked like plaster on screen. So a new practice developed: makeup formulated specifically for how it recorded, in colours that bear no relation to skin. Yellows and greenish tones photographed as convincing flesh; strongly pigmented lip colours in shades that looked bizarre in the room read correctly on the print.
Maksymilian Faktorowicz, who had trained in cosmetics and wigmaking in Poland and Russia before emigrating, built a business in Los Angeles around exactly this problem, trading as Max Factor. His firm supplied the studios, developed thinner and more flexible greasepaints for film use, and later introduced products designed for the successive technical transitions of the industry, including colour. The commercial insight that followed was the one that mattered for everybody else: what the studios used could be sold to the public as what the stars used.
1927 and after
Two changes arrived in the American industry at close to the same time in the second half of the 1920s: panchromatic film stock, which sees the full visible spectrum, and a shift from arc lighting to incandescent tungsten lighting, which produces a warmer, redder light that orthochromatic stock had handled badly.
The combined effect was to make the old corrective makeup wrong. Faces that had been built to compensate for a red blind emulsion now photographed as heavy and strange. The industry retooled, lighter formulations came in, and a recognisably modern screen makeup practice emerged within a few years. The transition happened almost simultaneously with the arrival of synchronised sound, which is why it is often invisible in histories of the period: everyone was looking at the microphones.
What the theorists noticed
Writers on film in the 1920s understood immediately that something new was happening. Béla Balázs argued that the close up revealed a physiognomy invisible in ordinary life, a micro expression of the face that theatre could not carry, and that cinema had therefore recovered a kind of visual culture that print had suppressed. Whatever one makes of the argument, the observation underneath it is sound: cinema created an audience trained to read faces at a level of detail no previous audience had ever practised.
That training is the durable legacy. Several generations learned to look at faces the way a camera looks at them, and then to look at their own faces the same way. The standards of evenness, symmetry and definition that came to seem natural are, in a specific and documented sense, standards derived from a lighting setup.
Cinema did not just show us faces. It taught an audience how to inspect one, and then handed everybody a mirror.
The lighting, which is the part nobody credits
Studio portrait lighting of the classical period was a highly codified system: a key light placed high and to one side, a fill to control the shadow, a backlight to separate the head from the background and produce a rim on the hair, and often a small light directed at the eyes. It flatters extremely reliably. It narrows the apparent width of the face, deepens the eye sockets, defines the jaw and cheekbone, and produces a specific catchlight in the eye that reads as vitality.
Almost every convention of contemporary photographic and cosmetic practice descends from it. Contouring is, functionally, a way of painting on the shadow that a key light would have produced. Highlighter paints on the specular reflection. The ring light, ubiquitous in the age of the front camera, is an attempt to get a flattering result without a lighting director, and it produces its own distinctive circular catchlight that is now itself a recognisable style.
Which means that when people talk about a face looking cinematic, they are being more literal than they know. The look is a lighting plan from a specific industry in a specific period, and it has been the default target of an enormous amount of subsequent effort.
The department that nobody credits
One further consequence of the close up deserves recording, because it created an entire skilled workforce whose names appear in credits and nowhere else. Studio makeup departments of the classical period were substantial operations with their own hierarchies, apprenticeships, laboratories and research. They developed materials, tested them under specific lighting conditions, kept detailed continuity records so that a face matched across shots filmed weeks apart, and solved problems that had no precedent because nobody had previously needed a face to look identical on Tuesday and on the following month's reshoot.
Continuity is the underrated part of this. A scene assembled from shots taken on different days under different conditions requires that the makeup, the hair and the lighting be reproducible to a degree that no theatrical practice had ever demanded. The instruments of that reproducibility were written records, photographic references and standardised products, and the last of those is the reason the film industry drove so much cosmetic formulation. A studio needs the same shade in September that it bought in March.
The same departments also handled prosthetics, ageing, injury and character work, which is a different discipline again and one with its own long lineage running back through theatrical practice. The division between beauty makeup and character makeup, which is still how the trade organises itself, is a studio era invention that reflected how the work was scheduled rather than any natural distinction between kinds of face.
And then it happened again
Every subsequent increase in image resolution has repeated the cycle in miniature. The arrival of high definition television in the 2000s produced a wave of trade press about how existing makeup practice was failing under the new resolution, and it prompted reformulation towards finer milling and better light diffusion. Digital cinema sensors did the same. In each case the sequence was identical to the panchromatic transition of the late 1920s: a technical change in capture, a period in which established practice suddenly looked wrong, and a reformulation towards lighter, finer, better blended application.
The pattern is now regular enough to be predictive. Whenever a capture technology resolves more detail, the response is not more coverage but less, applied more carefully, because at sufficient resolution any layer thick enough to conceal is thick enough to be seen as a layer.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The National Science and Media Museum and the Science Museum Group both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
Why did early film makeup use strange colours?
Because it was formulated for how it photographed, not for how it looked in the room. Orthochromatic stock rendered red as dark and was insensitive across much of the spectrum, so yellows, greens and unusual lip colours produced the most convincing result on the print.
What changed in the late 1920s?
Panchromatic film stock, sensitive across the visible spectrum, and a shift from arc to incandescent lighting. Together these made the older corrective makeup look wrong, and the industry moved to lighter and more natural formulations within a few years.
Who was Max Factor?
Maksymilian Faktorowicz, a cosmetics and wig specialist who emigrated from the Russian Empire and built a business in Los Angeles supplying the film studios. His firm developed makeup for successive film technologies and then sold consumer versions on the strength of that association.
Did Griffith invent the close-up?
No. Close shots appear in films made before his feature work, and the systematic use of shot scale within continuity editing was developed by many filmmakers across the 1910s. He was influential and he promoted the claim, which is why it stuck.
How did cinema lighting influence modern makeup?
Directly. Classical studio lighting narrows the face, deepens the eye sockets, defines the jaw and puts a highlight on the cheekbone. Contouring and highlighting reproduce those effects with pigment, and much contemporary practice is an attempt to obtain a lighting result without a lighting rig.
- National Science and Media Museum Film technology, stock, projection and the history of the moving image.
- Science Museum Group Photographic and cinematographic chemistry and equipment.
- British Library Trade press, film journals and studio publicity material of the period.
- Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and performance collections, including stage and screen makeup and costume.
- British Film Institute Film history collections and published scholarship on early cinema.
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