Close-ups and Gros Plans : Denis Villeneuve the Macrophage

This chapter conducts a detailed analysis of Denis Villeneuve’s frequent use of gros plans and close-ups throughout his oeuvre, from his early Quebec films through to his more recent Hollywood blockbusters. It explores how the binaries of largeness/nearness and transcendence/possession, highlighted by the different meanings of gros plans in French and ‘close-up’ in English, play out across Villeneuve’s oeuvre, while offering a typology of the macro as well as its effects of this technique on the spectator. The author highlights the particularities of Villeneuve’s use of close-ups, putting them in conversations with other shots to show how they function to draw the spectator’s attention to specific objects, or to the lack thereof.