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 #:
00041
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 mothers to the doctor, but they do not contradict the contribution. The film is entirely pictorial-minded. It takes the natives as it finds them and builds the image of their stolid movements. I detect in this, not the snobbery Lenauer finds, but relevant intelligence. However, I do not intend speaking upon Epstein here. I reserve that for a paper wholly upon him. I wish only to indicate that here is one source for the French cinema. And what will the French film take from Joan of Arc? It's perfection does not mean that it does not contain the germ of propagation. It too is built of the image. True it was done by a Scandinavian. But it was done with French material and it's method offers an opportunity for the French intelligence. Another source — and this is one out of the boundaries of France — is the Swedish film of the days of Sjostrom and Stiller. The American film, whose " technique so infatuates the French mind, is not a source for that mind. Sources : that is the first investigation every artist should make. I have dwelt upon the systemic sources for the French cinema. But, since the cinema, no more than any other art, is isolated, it will find its sources, not only in itself, nor in the mind immediately referring to it, but also in the other aesthetic articulations. Dreyer went to the medieval French miniature for a source to embolden the imagery, and hence the drama, of Joan. The French theatre is full of sources of identical mind with the French cinema mind : take Gaston Baty's production of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid. The pictorial mind dominates. The French cineasie must cease his absolutes of non-accord between the theatre