The cover of "Bigger Than Life"

Bigger Than Life

Mary Ann Doane ’74

Doane is a professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, from Duke University Press, studies the use of scale in cinema, particularly the close-up—and how such techniques can be used to impact the viewer’s sense of place, space, and orientation. As she observes, audiences once saw tight shots, especially of faces, as off-putting. “The close-up of early cinema,” she writes, “seems more acutely to evoke the possibility of breaching the limit of the screen, the protective barrier of representation.” Doane’s previous works include The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive and Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis.

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