segunda-feira, janeiro 24, 2005: As marcas da cirurgia plástica no cinema

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What is undeniable and increasingly unavoidable is that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face. Jean Renoir loved the close-ups of the silent era, because of what he believed they revealed "about the inward life of the idealized woman." But close-ups also reveal the outward life of the idealized woman and as such can also betray the ideal. The great silent auteur D. W. Griffith didn't invent the close-up, but he perfected the technique and in doing so gave us the gift of faces like those of Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Griffith seemed to know that, and in a 1918 film he softened the edges in the close-ups of Gish because the star, then in her early 20's, was considered old for one of his heroines.

The great Hollywood studios were built on stars and the cults of beauty and youth that rose around them. It's worth noting that the rise of the classical studio star system parallels the increased acceptance and use of the close-up, which was not a popular technique until after the mid-teens. (As Griffith put it, "the feet can't act.") At least one critic has argued that DVD and video have fostered another boom in close-ups, but such real and extended shots seem rare in contemporary Hollywood. Not only because few filmmakers fix on an image for more than a few seconds, but also because many famous faces cannot withstand such detailed attention. These faces suggest that the digital avatars so beloved by cinematic technocrats will be able to replace the human actor more easily than some of us imagined.
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The New York Times > Movies > One Word for What's Happening to Actors' Faces Today: Plastics

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