I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.

• Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
• “I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
• “In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
• Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”