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 #:
000412
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 gent about all that, I prefer the organ there's something unspontaneous about the orchestra, you get it watching them stuck up there in violet light, the organ vrooming and slightly hurdygurdyish goes better, it marches, but the orchestra. . . I know in straight photography you don't get the impressions of things, aeroplanes for example, really aeroplanes suggest noise and power and distance, one feels that when one sees them blowing grass behind and the trousers of mechanics. . . That's how I would do it, photograph the engines, superimpose close-ups of the blowing trousers of mechanics, and blowing grass, and glide the camera about near-to a little drunkenly across wings and the body like an eye a little frightened, and show in the same drunken way in peeps the blowing grass and cloudy skies. . . . You don't get the feeling you get really Avhen they take a photograph simpty of an aeroplane starting, you don't get the feeling you would really have, it doesn't mean much, the photograph doesn't get across what happens when you are actually standing beside an aeroplane with its engines going, and the thing to do is to get across the impression you have of that aeroplane not to simply turn some photographs of it starting. The blown trousers and feet moving across blown grass and blown wildflowers and something of the usual delay, and a mackintosh blowing and surging, closeups of propellors and bustle That's where they go wrong, they don't get across the feeling of things, because the external aspect reacts differently in a photograph from the real thing, they got that well in the chariot race in Ben Hur, thej^ did get the feeling one would have, it was not so 58