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entertain the elk

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the landscape

it's the shot most associated with the

westerns of classical hollywood deserts

mountains

tall grass muscular men carrying guns

riding horses and shooting each other

native americans harvesting and

defending their land

men women and children packing up

everything they own in a stagecoach and

searching for a new life

battling the elements in the hope for a

better future

this is the western genre

it's pure americana

but then came italian director sergio

leone the landscape shots remained but

with them came a distinctive feature the

close-up the one shot most associated

with leone's work

when leone made his first western a

fistful of dollars in 1964 everything

changed

in his article euphoria and liberating

laughter the cinema of sergio leone film

critic adrian martin wrote it was like

seeing the death throws of the hollywood

western violently displaced

reinterpreted and pulped to shreds in

another country yet it also suggested

birth the birth of a new kind of cinema

the close-up served as a microscope for

leone to examine dissect and then

reimagine one of hollywood's most

celebrated genres

five of sergio leone's seven films were

called spaghetti westerns a term derived

from the fact that these films were made

in europe primarily by italians and

non-americans the films and their makers

became known as disruptors spaghetti

westerns poked holes in the american

myth of the west preferring anti-heroes

instead of the more typical heroes

played by actors like john wayne jimmy

stewart henry fonda and gary cooper and

leonie's most famous anti-hero was the

man with no name played by clint

eastwood the man with no name is the

figure at the center of a fistful of

dollars

for a few dollars more

and the good the bad and the ugly

[Music]

the films known as leone's dollars

trilogy

these were the films that helped make

eastwood a star and it's easy to see why

leone's close-up perfectly captured

eastwood's handsome suave and pensive

face as the camera lingers on his eyes

we wonder what is he thinking

what does he want what is he going to do

next

early film theorists were fascinated by

cinema's ability to bring the audience

close to objects people and places and

in particular the faces of stars in his

book mythologies roland barth breaks

down this slice of movie magic in his

article garbo's face greta garbo still

belongs to that moment in cinema when

the apprehension of the human

countenance plunged crowds into the

greatest perturbation where people

literally lost themselves in the human

image as if in a filter when the face

constituted a sort of absolute state of

the flesh which one could neither attain

nor abandon

it's easy to understand why close-ups of

the face take such a hold of the

audience you don't get that kind of view

at a concert or watching an actor on

stage it's the magic of the camera the

ability to see blood sweat and tears in

a way that allows us to feel the

emotions that play out across a

character's face in a visceral way in

fact we often get to see the person more

closely than we would if we were

standing right in front of them as if

they were under a magnifying glass for

our complete and thorough examination

in that sense the image transcends

reality and becomes as barth says

something that one could neither attain

nor abandon

it exists before our eyes but we cannot

touch it or smell it or talk back we are

forced to sit back and stare at the

image as it's presented to us that kind

of intimacy is one thing that cinema

gives us that few other art forms can

so why does leone opt for the close-up

what makes the shot such an effective

and powerful visual choice

well before we get more philosophical

let's start with a quick analysis of

what the close-up is and how leone used

it here's the final scene of leone's

epic once upon a time in the west

harmonica played by charles bronson has

spent years chasing one man frank played

by henry fonda when harmonica was a boy

frank killed his brother in the most

gruesome and horrific way imaginable and

harmonica understandably wants revenge

we don't know these details until the

final shootout when leone zooms in on

harmonica's face and cuts to a flashback

of course we see the hatred play out on

harmonica's face but there's more than

just that in his eyes and the lines on

his face we get a sense of history of

age of all that he has endured and what

has transpired since that fateful day

no words or explanations are needed

lesser directors may opt for a long

monologue at this climactic moment but

not leone the poetic ambiguity of his

close-up says more about what harmonica

is wishing feeling and thinking in this

moment than dialogue ever could

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now let's go back to eastwood leone

shows us the man with no name's face in

various close-ups throughout the early

moments of a festival of dollars and

leone has him do things a typical

western hero would do when we first see

him we watch contempt play out across

his face as a group of villains assault

a father in front of his son he drinks

he smokes

and he gets himself out of tricky

situations with the precision of his gun

that's what we've come to expect our

western heroes to do

but there's something different about

eastwood's character he's not the

conventional hero and there's something

about his face that suggests a different

darker side

ironically it's the film's antagonist

ramon rojo who first points this out

after meeting the man with no name for

the first time he says i don't like that

americano he's too smart to be just a

hired fighter when someone with that

face

works with his gun you may count on two

things he's fast on the trigger but he's

also intelligent that makes him too

dangerous for you i think my brother the

man with no name is certainly not

someone you can trust he's both a hero

and a villain sometimes he's a criminal

other times he's a bounty hunter he's

willing to kill steal torture and do

things that the typical hero wouldn't do

leone disrupts the conventional heroes

of the west to reveal the dark

underbelly of it all there is no good

without the bad and ugly

there are moments when eastwood's

handsome face seems to resemble that

classic hero but there are times when

leone even disrupts this by literally

damaging eastwood's face throughout the

dollars trilogy his face often takes a

beating and leone is not afraid to show

us in full effect in a fist full of

dollars his face is badly cut and

bruised after the villains capture and

torture him and in the good the bad and

the ugly his face becomes deeply burned

and chapped after tuko aka the ugly

forces him to crawl through the desert

it's far from the perfectly lit and kept

face of john wayne at the beginning of

john ford's stagecoach

[Music]

in an essay called the face of man film

theorist bella belaz wrote that when a

director cuts to a close-up of the face

the viewer loses all reference to space

when we see not a figure of flesh and

bone but an expression

for feelings emotions moods intentions

thoughts are not themselves things

pertaining to space even if they are

rendered visible by means which are and

so when leone cuts to eastwood's

mutilated face we see something more

than our anti-hero struggling to survive

we see the expression of a director

attacking and upending a storied genre

and revealing a brutality that's always

lingered just below its surface

we see this play out in a different way

in leone's 1971 film duck you sucker the

film is set in mexico in the 1910s

during the mexican revolution the film

follows a pair of anti-heroes juan

miranda a notorious mexican criminal and

sean mallory a wanted irish

revolutionary and demolition expert the

film is a hilarious and dark political

satire that follows the two men as they

accidentally become heroes in the

revolution while planning a large crime

the film opens with a great scene in

which juan and his team of bandits rob a

luxury stagecoach filled with the worst

kinds of rich people everything from the

clothes they wear to the tea they drink

in the books they read is pretentious

juan tricks them into letting him aboard

by pretending to be a hitchhiker the

passengers eat drink and hurl insulting

questions and profanities at him

you know

how many kids you have huh

he doesn't know anything you see because

that's what they are

animals

leonie pairs their revolting language

and behavior with equally revolting

shots in a series of extreme close-ups

leone brings us to their mouths and

beady eyes and shows them drinking and

eating with a level of gluttony that

would make even the most sinful man

blush

in these close-ups leonia is again

upending more idyllic tellings of white

people settling the west and instead

shows us racist shameless colonizers

while classical hollywood may have

focused on tales like the shootout at

the ok corral or the alamo leone opts

for something else a darker truer

portrait of the people who exploited

others for their own wealth and material

gain and he does so not with some

grandiose scene but with some nasty

chewing

in an essay called the close-up balaz

writes the camera has uncovered the cell

life of the viral issues in which all

great events are ultimately conceived

for the greatest landslide is only the

aggregate of the movements of single

particles a multitude of close-ups can

show us the very instant in which the

general is transformed into the

particular the close-up not only widened

our vision of life it has also deepened

it in the days of the silent film it not

only revealed things but showed us the

meaning of the old

is there a better way to describe the

essence of leone cinema

sure there's still the beautiful

landscape shots and the elaborate

shootouts we have come to expect with

the western genre

but with his close-ups and extreme

close-ups he not only gives us a new

kind of western and a new way of seeing

but a new way of watching understanding

honoring and even critiquing that which

came before it that is leonie's genius

and in many ways the essence of art

now let's pivot away from the spaghetti

westerns towards once upon a time in

america leone's final film once upon a

time in america is a gangster epic set

mostly in the early part of the 20th

century in new york city the film

centers on a pair of best friends

noodles played by robert de niro and max

played by james woods the film is an

epic in every sense of the word and

depending on the cut you're watching is

well over three and a half hours long

but i only want to focus on one shot

and it's the final shot of both the film

and leone's career a close-up by the

time one encounters this shot we have

just watched hours of film witnessed

decades of time gone by seen men and

women beaten and killed empires rise and

fall and dreams crash and burn

the film if one had to distill it to a

single premise is leoni's deconstruction

of the american dream the film begins

with noodles entering an opium den and

then learning that his three best

friends have been killed by the police

the film then continues from there

taking us back to the group's days on

the streets as teenagers up through the

time when they ran one of the most

successful speakeasies in all of

brooklyn it's their version of the

american dream

leone returns to this opium den at the

end of the film as a kind of epilogue

while there we see noodles take a long

drag lay back and begin to laugh

the image stills and then fades to black

the film and thus leone's career comes

to a close on his signature shot

beneath the drugs there is truth and

what might that truth be

who knows and frankly it doesn't really

matter therein lies the power of the

close-up ambiguity with a simple shot

leone undermines our entire way of

viewing his film with each new viewing

we might see something different in a

character's face and gestures a glance

or a smirk

for leone that ambiguity is subversive a

way to probe the infinite dimensions of

american life under his signature

magnifying glass of a shot

[Music]

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