Close Up (Jul-Nov 1927)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Nov 1927
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000225
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Switzerland, Early Cinema, and Global Cinema
Format:
Periodicals
Contributor:
Library of Congress, MBRS, Moving Image Section
Sponsor:
Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
As an active film magazine, CLOSE UP lasted only a short time, from 1927 to 1933. Yet the legacy of this English-language periodical, which was published in Switzerland, continues to matter. Edited by Bryher and her husband Kenneth Macpherson, CLOSE UP became THE magazine for energetic debates about the nature of cinema and manifestos imagining new forms of filmmaking and spectatorship. The magazine published articles by filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, and female literary modernists, such as H.D. and Gertrude Stein. As film scholar Anne Friedberg explains in the anthology CLOSE-UP, 1927-1933: CINEMA & MODERNISM, 'CLOSE UP became the model for a certain type of writing about film -- writing that was theoretically astute, politically incisive, critical of films that were simply 'entertainment.' For six and a half years, CLOSE UP maintained a forum for a broad variety of ideas about the cinema; it never advocated a single direction of development, but rather posed alternatives to existing modes of production, consumption, and film style.' Like Friedberg's own writing, CLOSE UP continues to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of film and media theory. -- Eric Hoyt, 2014
Date Added:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP In the case of ''The Admirable Crichton", however, the character drawing is so finished, that apart from the note on the programme which informs us that two years have elapsed between the acts, we can feel and obser^^e the intervening period of the comedy being vividly sketched in. It is not only a matter of stage artifice but far more of clean, illuminating, psychological strokes that stir up the motion of the pla\' and move it along ; of significant changes of manner, habit, speech, dress and external circumstance. The playwright dips so deeply (and so choicely) into the past that Lord Loam's drawing room, w^here the action began, is a fuU two-and-ahalf j^ears distant in imagination by the time we reach the end of the play. Let us now bind up the argument by a glance at "Warning Shadows". There can be no mistaking the time-sequence here. It is. intolerably present from one moment to the next. How is this effect produced ? In the Western drama the action was so extended as to be almost nebulous. It was faintly, if at all, perceived. Here a different, more conscientious technique sends one event panting on the heels of another till their proximity virtually solidifies. Fate is then betrayed in motion. It is like waiting for the pincers to seize the tooth ; each moment is a recognition of doom^. The rhj^thm of the fikn, however, is slow% and the slower the rhythm the weightier the strokes of the clock as they fall. The triangular theme of jealousy here unfolded, from the laying of the banquet, which the fatal three, attend, to the stabbing of the unfaithful wife with the sheaf of swords, is worked out minute by minute, 59