Start Over

Close Up (Jan-Jun 1928)

Page scan 000399 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000399
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP maximum of possible realism, scrapping no matter what scene where the play of the actors seems to me theatrical. I demand again and again, should not one in such films as this break down the barriers which separate the man in the street from the professional actor, when the former possesses the aptitude necessary to competently fill his role ? It depends only on the perspicacity of a director to film a perfectly natural scene. That is why I recruited, in order to turn this film, men who had never before appeared in any film, and who had no connection with any theatrical enterprise. For example, the hero of the film, Tschuwileff , is an accountant by profession. His first appearance before the camera was in my film Mutter (The Mother). All the others, with the exception of Baranowskaja are neither film nor stage actors. They are workers, soldiers, in fact no matter what, all of whom my assistant Doller was occupied in collecting. I could talk at length on the proper technical means to bring constant variety into the manner of taking and showing a film. One of these methods has permitted me to project a mingling vision of the front and of the Exchange, and to each one the thing that specially attracts him,— his own particular rhythms. To determine an unique rhythm which is able to impress itself upon the spectator will be, in my opinion, the greatest task of the artistic film." E. Hellmund-Waldow. 35