Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000183 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 #:
000183
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 Our age is an optical age. The rapidity of events and their brief duration require a receiving apparatus which can register as speedily as possible. It is the Eye. The speed of light waves exceeds that of all other waves. The Film is the optical flying-machine of our era. I will repeat what I published as earlv as 1922 : The elementar}' difference between Cinema and Theatre consists in the fact that the Film is a play on a surface — the Theater a plav in space. This difference has not been realized concretely either in the Theater architecture nor in the Cinema architecture up to the present day. I estabhshed an ideal project for the Theatre in The Endless Theatre," in Paris, 1925. In contrast to it, I have now also adapted the Ideal Cinema to the American BuildingLaws, in New York, 192G. While the ideal Theatre is dedicated to the Spoken Word, the ideal Cinema is " The House of Silence " The Wordless House or rather " The House of SoundingVibrations ". The Theatre must give up the present " Peepshow form which will pass over, in a purified state, to the Cinema as the ideal picture-theatre. This new form, of the Cinema will give the most artistic and economical possibilities, much more than in any Cinema of to-dav. The constructivistic experiments in decoration of the Russians (Tairoft', ^^IcA^erhold and others), the futuristic attempts of tlie Italians, and the expressionistic work of the Germans (Jessner, Poelzig and others) have achieved no