Larger than life

Things become frankly more interesting when the grand plan is presented as a literal event. In other words: when something or someone (almost always a face) occupies the screen as an irreplaceable reality. Or to use a richer symbology, typical of cinema, when the images seek a sensation, perhaps a sensuality, larger than life. Alfred Hitchcock’s wide shots may serve as a standard for such figurative boldness – if the shower scene, with Janet Leigh, in Psycho (1960), persists as a legendary reference in the cinephile imagination, this is due, above all else, to the radical intensity of the respective long shots.

This comes in connection with the recent discovery of the film The Chronology of Waterdirected by Kristen Stewart, with Imogen Poots in the central role. And it will certainly not be accidental that its strange and captivating beauty results, not exactly from pictorial values, but rather from a systematic – and, more than that, obsessive – use of the close-up. Furthermore: perhaps it would take the eyes of someone who has been exposed to cinema for a long time (understand: an actress) to conceive such a staging and, above all, to use the grand plan in such a risky and inventive way.

We are faced with the exact opposite of the everyday trivialization of the grand plan in soap operas. Then, we move from a medium shot to the face of the actor or actress only because mediocre rhetoric demands that a routine of varying scales be maintained – the long shot does not result from any specific dramatization, just from an automatic editing system that will always be the same, regardless of its coordinator.

What Kristen Stewart proposes to us in The Chronology of Water it is a rediscovery of objects and their presence, of human beings and their emotions, in which the long shot is far from being just a reproduction of the “same” that we saw in the previous shot, just “closer”. By way of a suggestive contrast, we can even say that the close-up involves us in a strange ambivalence in which this feeling of proximity (with the skin, the tears, the disorder of the hair) corresponds to a revelation of something that has something like a galaxy of infinite details.

Are all big plans (or have to be) like this? No, it’s not about replacing one rhetoric with another. It’s just about experiencing cinema as an event that does not enclose what it shows in a closed and unalterable meaning. What counts is meaning or, if you like, the certainty that looking does not exhaust the meanings of the world – but helps us to deal with its multitude.

Journalist