Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000171 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 #:
000171
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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CLOSE UP unlimited opportunity he represents, overshadows the rest. And films for children are, as Mr. Mearns points out, the film *s great opportunity. An opportunity that can be used to its utmost only by such films as may operate upon the child without need of adult intervention. Films are by their nature precluded from emulating those children's books, many of them excellent, which are intended to be read aloud and expounded. And the pull of the film is just here, in its unsupplemented directness, in the way it can secure collaboration in independence of the grown-up medium who may so easily, by the business of exposition carried too far, inhibit, or at least retard, in the child, the natural desire to explore on its own account. Interpretation should be, as far as possible, implicit. A good picture will tell its own story. The caption, at its utmost only the passing shadow of intervention, is usually indispensable, particularly for the instructional film, which at present is apt to be rather insufficiently captioned. Psychologists have quite justifiably protested in horror and dismav at the way the average nature " film lends to the depicted natural processes an unnatural smooth swiftness and unreality that the child's lack of experience renders it unable to correct. Most of these films appear to have been devised merely to astonish, to give sensational exhibitions of the wonders of nature." Inadequate captioning leaves these marvels to lie about in the child's mind unrelated to any kind of actuality. The chick emerging from its shell with the ease and swiftness of a conjuring trick is a well-known example of a method of presentation whose evil can be mitigated only by careful captional commentary. — 25