Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000176 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 #:
000176
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 photographs upon a screen in which the actors have reality only by their silence, the human voice shatters that reality. Beyond that . . . the films already have their voice : have always had it. Perhaps few have consciously realized it, even among little theatre audiences. It is probable, too, that not more than a dozen directors have known that they were using sounds in their silent screen work ; but in all the better work> and in spots throughout the lesser films, the human voice has been speaking, the sounds of life have been caught by the screen and carried to the sensitive in audiences. The thing is so obvious that it seems I must be uttering platitudes in asserting it. But I have asked many intelligent men and women, and few of them have admitted that they hear what I hear. The gong in Metropolis, A mere gong, banging away, is nothing. One acknowledges that there is a noise, but one does not feel it as one feels the boom of that gong alarming the workers. You have to feel noise, as you taste color, hear sights, and see feeling. It rests upon an interchange of senses. Only the hyper-sensitive realize this fully ; but in men of any feeling at all, the talent is ready to assert itself in varying degrees, when brought forth by an understanding hand upon the camera. In Metropolis, the effect was achieved by Fritz Lang — and I am sure consciously — by swinging the hammer toward the audience. As the hammer struck the gong, a booming sound was born, and this was at once carried into the theatre by the enlarging of the hammer as it swung nearer the camera. Soon the ears of the sensitive were filled with a swelling volume of sound. In the same way, all the sounds of life can be made audible. 30