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Taking the analysis he and Malte Hagener committed to paper in their text Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Sense, Thomas Elsaesser has created a video essay on close-ups in the work of Ingmar Bergman. By examining them through the best possible method, visual display, Elsaesser, Hagener, and narrator Stephanie Hayes (reading the authors’ words) are “[giving] a meta-cinematic dimension to a filmmaker’s apparently personal themes and private obsessions.”

In a film culture that seems to have increasingly smaller use for certain tenets of classic international cinema — this Bordwell piece was published in 2007, and the situation has only grown less positive in Bergman’s case — this sort of work reminds us why people (you or otherwise) were attracted to it in the first place. With this in mind, the extent to which it highlights a simple grace in these works, and how this underscores a certain visual-emotional complexity that might otherwise seem perfunctory — i.e., “no wonder close-ups express emotion,” yes, but that’s only about a third of their use therein — is a fine service.

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