On the use of the close-up and what it means when a director trusts the face.

The close-up is cinema's most powerful tool and its most overused one. Used well, it reveals what the human face is capable of as an expressive instrument. Used badly, it tells the audience how to feel rather than letting them discover it.

Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is the most extreme case of the close-up as primary language: the film is almost entirely close-ups of Falconetti's face, and the argument it makes is that the face contains everything the story needs. The dialogue, the crowds, the architecture — all of this is present in how Falconetti's expression changes across the film's duration.

Bresson distrusted the close-up because he distrusted expression: for him the close-up was an invitation to the actor to perform rather than to be. His solution was to cut away from faces before the expression resolved, leaving the viewer to construct the emotion from the context.

Both positions are right, which reveals that the close-up is not a technique with a correct use but a relationship between camera and subject that different directors establish on different terms.