«Brobdingnagian Monstrosity» and the Life Size Reception: the Criticism of Close-Up in the American Film Journalism of 1910s

Section: History of Journalism

It is well known that the arising of the close-up in the early cinema faced a strong resistance, although the genesis of the resistance is not quite clear. In order to understand it, the author analyses the discussion of the size of the screen image in “The Moving Picture World” of the early 1910s. The core of the discussion was the notion of necessity of the natural size of the depicted objects on the screen. This indicates the existence of the specific form of space perception in early film — the life-size reception.