In the famous last shots of вЂњ Queen ChristinaвЂќ (1933), GarboвЂ™s androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a ship bearing her away from her country the body of her lover, killed in a duel over her, is laid out on the deck. But her acting was perhaps most effective in her silent films or in nonverbal scenes in talking pictures in which her face is the canvas for emotion.

She belonged, as Roland Barthes wrote, вЂњto that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image.вЂќ This is not to diminish her craft as an actress. And characters became more complex.вЂќДЄ face as beautiful as GarboвЂ™s-the enormous eyes and deep-set lids, the way love or tenderness or some private, unspoken amusement unknit her brows in an instant, melting her austerity-was almost overwhelming when it filled the screen.

вЂњWhen filmmakers realized that they could use a close-up to achieve this kind of emotional effect, cameras started coming in closer. вЂњA real close-up of an actor is about going in for an emotional reason that you canвЂ™t get any other way,вЂќ Schrader writes. Griffith film from 1912, вЂњFriends,вЂќ in which the camera comes in tight on Mary PickfordвЂ™s face, revealing her ambivalence about which of two suitors she should choose. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader picks as a turning point the moment in a D.В W. But filmmakers soon grasped the centripetal seductions of the human face in tight focus. Many of the shots credited as the first closeups were unlikely to have set hearts aflame, since they were often of objects-a shoe, a wrench. What Garbo had to offer, above all, was her extraordinary face, at a time when the closeup, with its supercharged intimacy, its unprecedented boon to the emotional and erotic imagination, was still relatively new. Nor has it seemed to matter that only a handful of her movies are much watched or admired today. But Garbo had acquired an enigmatic mythos even before she ended her career-the Hollywood colony treated her like royalty. (By comparison, Bette Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl Streep has made nearly seventy and still counting.) That slender output could be part of the mystique, compounded by her disappearing act. Garbo made only twenty-eight movies in her lifetime. When she appeared in her first sound picture, вЂњ Anna Christie,вЂќ the ads proclaimed, вЂњGarbo talks!вЂќ for her first sound comedy, вЂњ Ninotchka,вЂќ it was вЂњGarbo laughs!вЂќ Quite why she became such a phenomenon is a puzzle to which film critics and biographers keep returning. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.ДЇew other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did-she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon fell away, like a spent rocket booster, in the ballyhoo surrounding her. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie-вЂњI want to be aloneвЂќ-became so fused with her image. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. For a star who, more than any other, вЂњinvaded the subconscious of the audience,вЂќ as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, вЂњ GarboвЂќ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J.В D. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.ДЇame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move.

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