Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00036
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 and the most interesting films are those made from the atelier y single-artist viewpoint. This does not infer that the French film must rest in the ateliery as the pictorial mind does not infer that the French film must remain in the framed set. Not in the least. The instances of Finis Terrae, En Rade, Two Timid Souls are sufficient to gainsay such inferences. Yet these films are films with their sources in the atelier-mind and the pictorial-mind. With Epstein the atelier becomes the study, for speculation and metaphysics. En Rade is the pictorial mind providing an enveloping environment. Two Timid Souls is evidence of the pictorial mind creating comic rhetoric of the picture. Comedy in America is action. The gag in Two Timid Souls is a pictorial gag, in Harold Lloyd it is the antic gag. Chaplin makes very little of the picture. The atelier-souvce does not (the word source " is the explanation) limit the French film to the laboratory where Jean Lenauer confines it, although the experimental film will always be a French contribution. Nor does it restrict the film to its absolute forms. It means simply that the film companies must recognize the mind of the French artist and w^ork according to it. The Societe Generale des Films promised to be just that sort of corporation, allowing the director, and not the fiscal policy, to set the pace. At present the Societe Generale seems to be biding its time amid the confusion caused by the talking picture. But its single-film policy is the accurate one for the French cinema. For that cinema, because of the characteristics detectable in it (which I have considered above) will not be a world's popular cinema, and no contingement can make it that. In fact, the 18