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 #:
000226
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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 and we can feel these minutes being stuffed into the clock until Time is ready to burst. The picture illustrates how a close synchronisation of rhythm in a film with the actual rhythms of everj'daj'-^ life can heighten realismi to an extraordinary degree, though there are a hundred considerations, unconnected with the time factor, which make this particular drama rich and passionate, and give a bright glow of significance to the whole. Its treatment suggests that a technique which presents a close succession of ideas, as opposed to their wide extension in the crude drama of the West, is bound to intensif)^ the mood of the picture and increase the sensibility of the spectator to its chronolog}". It appears, then, that the truest type of film, considered mainty at its time valuation, or order in logic, is that which, with due proportion and sense, binds together the largest num.ber of ideas in the smallest possible compass, just as the dramatist obeys a strict law of econom\' in the management of his dialogue, characters and situations. So also the novehst, allowing for necessary differences of medium. In "War and Peace", "The Forsyte Saga" and still more clearly in Marcel Proust, the illusion of time is aknost perfecth' conveyed. But the film has many a league to go in this research, though "Greed", even in a badly-cut version, tackled the problem squarely and gave us some long-receding distances of time in slow, brilliantly-commonplace succession. In the m^ajorit}^ of fibns the time element is not given its right relation to the events portrayed, except by fits and starts, almost by accident, or when the producer can only get his eftects by 60