Bent Fausing

CLOSE-UPS

A close-up can immediately be seen as the end of an image or a serial of images. It is. At the same time the close-up open up against and points to a very different universe without structure and deprived of fixed points, beyond any purpose. Close-up is not a link in a chain, a single moment in a row, an extracted fragment in scale. Close-up is the physical of an abstraction and an abstraction of the tangible, whether it is an actual face, or it's the face like things that are considered.

The close-up is the place where the surface of the image breaks.

What could immediately be regarded as the endpoint of perception is therefore also an openness to the infinite formations, sensations and emotions. The close-up is transparent and magical points where inner and outer meet.

The closer you get a face or an object, the more abstract will face and the thing will occur. At the same time the subject becomes more promising in its infinite variety of forms, associations and solutions, which arise with it at close range, and that makes the internal and external interact with each other, because
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the perception limits are dissolved on the outside and the inside.

The close-up is a faltering point because of all, it is able to condense, absorb and remove.

Affection-image is Gilles Deleuze's term for a close-up, a close up of a face or a thing, which in this process gets face-like. The affectionimage fills in the opening between action and reaction, movement and standstill.

The affect absorbs an external movement and reacts in the internal instead of. This reaction manifests itself as reflections on the surface of the things or as micro-concentrated movements.

Seen from a very rigid psychoanalytictheoretical point of view the close-up would be regarded as an image, which has replaced an articulation from the unconscious; castration. In a rhetorical-theoretical frame the close up would in short be called a synecdoche, a part instead of the whole; pars pro proto. These two and related explanations are mistaken, the close-up of a face or a thing, which then takes form as a physiognomy, is something unique in itself, not part of something,

When the body loses its possibility for expansion the movement instead becomes an expression, which is accumulated as an essence in the face or gives things face value, Gilles Deleuze argues in continuation of Bela Balzs's thoughts about the animism of things.

Every time we discover these two poles in something - a reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements - we can say that a thing has been treated as a face, which has been looked at or made face like and in return stares at useven if it is not a face.

Explained in other words: The affect is connected to expansion, if the body loses its possibility for expansion the dynamic becomes expression instead of, an expression which can

be condensed in the face, or which can add face-features to things.

Even where a concrete physical expansion is not possible, the affect nevertheless remains bodily, as an expression first and foremost in the face and moreover as the face-likeness of things. Furthermore the expression will manifest itself with a concentrated glow in parts of the image.

These images reminded me of the face value of everything.

(Images & text copyright Bent Fausing)

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