It would be arguable that the gold standard of commercial narrative film, the ‘affection image’ or facial close-up, is a fatal error for any cinema of the Left; that Griffith's pioneering innovations in the conventions of close-up cinematography were nothing less than a capture of the fledgling discourse of narrative cinema for the forces of sentimental reaction, leaving a legacy of bourgeois individualism lodged within the very grammar of the form. The conventions of eye-line matching and shot-reverse-shot montage, and the anchoring of emotional catharsis in the fetishised face as such, have tended to predispose commercial film narrative towards an individualist formal conservatism – melodrama in the age of mechanical reproduction. To that extent, the programmed apparition of these faces in a crowd – the routine singling out of some privileged visage from amid the anonymous masses of modernity – functions invariably in narrative cinema as a foreclosure of potential political energies, and their translation into some other ethical discourse: personal, emotive, moralistic. Within the hegemony of the close-up as ‘money-shot’ of sentimental cinema, other modes of framing, especially the long shot, are subordinated to roles of mere locational establishment or the necessary discharge of kinetic energy in relatively autonomous action sequences. It is more or less impossible to construct a critical political cinema in the terms offered by this hegemony, even when treating the most ‘radical’ materials, as witness the fatuous mendacities of Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), or the clunking mechanics of the biopic in Frida (2002), to mention only two egregious examples.

The long history of Left cinema has typically sought strategies of refusing this particular trap of ideological closure, and to articulate new, collective ways of seeing and feeling in film form. Eisenstein's heroic working masses tended to swarm inside the frame, dynamically overrunning the Apollonian constraints of the individual body on screen, and serving to counterpoint his mostly satiric close-up portraits of the people's class enemies. Apart from their service in framing the notable ‘world-historical’ individuals (Kerensky, Lenin, Ivan, Nevsky) who people his films, Eisenstein's close-ups were indeed more often of Marxian ‘types’ than bourgeois subjects: lumpens, spies, ecclesiastics, officers, politicians, and industrialists.