Close Up (Jan-Jun 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00044
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 28, 2022
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP anything. It is a city that does not compose. It is full of very bad enormous things and insists on great spaces in which the sense of frame and content is lost. I found myself visually stupified and observing only what I did not wish to observe. When I came out of the Jannings picture, I suddenly saw the pictorial values of Washington and caught from the picture (Variety) the trick of looking at it. Washington is a gallery of fragments, fascinating lovely fragments. In that gallery* nothing must be looked at as a whole. The secret of the composition in the Jannings picture was the fragment caught from an eccentric angle. The ordinary film gives you whole interiors, whole landscapes, full length portraits, and perfectly conventional threequarters, busts, and portrait heads. The fragment is almost wholly neglected. It is obviously the way to do still life and the way to get contrast with occasional landscapes, interiors, and conventional moving portraits, all of which need to be minimized not only because the}' are most likely to be bad compositions, but because they have been overdone. The fragment convinces that it is part of a larger unseen reality. The whole stands in a void where the imagination figures only the illusion destroying walls of the studio or the ropes and mechanical contraptions back stage. Aside from this photographic success, the Jannings pictures give a great deal of verity in acting that is unusuaL Good character types fortunately are the rule in the movies. It is one thing they habitually get. But intelligible portrayal of human character I find very rare. They run to an increas 28