Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000185 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 #:
000185
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 The factor of next importance is Acoustics. Mechanized music differs in its acoustic results from ordmary music. It has been proved that the Film cannot exist of itself. The silent film is a dead film, the film without music is exhausting, impossible for any length of time, especially the length of a whole evening. The films are exhausting because they make all their demands on a single sense, the sense of sight. This is opposed to the laws of the human organism. Every one of the five senses must be supported by one of the others to attain its highest powers. We see better while hearing, and we hear better while seeing. We must be able to see music, just as we must be able to hear a spectacle or a picture. For this reason there is a complete misunderstanding of elementary facts and artistic misconception in the complete refusal to accept the sounding-film or the color-film. On^ must not be misled by the absolutely unsatisfactory first attempts. Some day MUSIC, combined with COLOR and FILM, will be brought to a new perfect unity in a new art which I have named OPTOPHONETICS. But as long as the film expresses itself in black and white, and because of the very lack of color, it is from the beginning not an imitation of nature, but a new form of artistic creation. But when the color-film reproduces merely a photograph, a copy of scenery, the cleavage between nature and art, between the spectator and nature, grows less ; and so in a work of pure imitation, the artistic effect and every effect on the psyche of the spectator fails completely. All sense of illusion is lost, because the separation between nature and art is lacking. In the Film, as in every other art, everything depends on 39