Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 00096 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00096
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:
July 25, 2024
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CLO'SE UP ses, nail down the carpet, and you may disguise the fact that it has just been dragged from the property department and unrolled on the studio floor. But why worn.', it is onh' a British picture, a quota picture I The quota, a drig which has lulled the executive staff into apathy — the exhibitor must buj^ I As the carpets so the plots. Lifted from the dusty shelves of the scenario editor's office and bundled into the picture without any of the wrinkles smoothed or the stains removed. The press are fond of calling these transpontine pictures, "machine-made" melodrama. "Machine-made", a favourite cliche which gives the whole secret of the British scenarist to the British public ; most of these stories are actually made with a machine — a plot machine 1 Xo, I am not joking, and if you think of some recent British pictures you will be grateful that in some cases, at least, it is a machine, and not a man, which has fallen so low. (As examples of recent British pictures shown to the trade I might mention "Silver Lining", "Remembrance", and "Tommy Aktins"). Naturally the machine is not very ingenious but it is reverently placed on the desks of many highly paid British script manufacturers. x\ plot machine is made by dismantling a calendar, one of the kind that are known as "perpetual calendars". You twiddle a knob and the day of the week revolves on a roller behind a slit in the cardboard front ; another knob gives the month ; while the date is printed on a strip of material which runs between to other rollers. A piece of clean paper is pasted round the existing rollers, and new rollers made ; also a fresh card 60