Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000204 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 #:
000204
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 cinematography, when emotions were registered like impromptu dumb charades. Sub-title : She is overcome with remorse. View of lady in plush chair with pompoms, and a palm on a stand. She jigs backward and forward, slapping herself heartily on the forehead and masticating her mouth as far in every direction as she can reach. Flings her hands heavenward. Rolls her eyes, and that is that. She sits there waiting for her next emotion. Indeed, revivals seem to be the order of the day. Paris and Switzerland have shown a most entertaining series of news reels, entitled Paris Twenty Years Ago. The Tauentzien Palast gives sly insertions of hand-coloured fashions for ladies worn by the most restless mannequins it is possible to conceive. And dramas from the school of the dying child, where a large, fat and elderly female angel appears from a puff of smoke, and waddling to the bed, hoists up the departing spirit with considerable difficulty and again vanishes in a puff of smoke, while father is gambolling with loose women in the nearest house of ill repute. These films are greeted with pure delight. The public love them, and they have, moreover, a real value. It occurred to the writer during one of them, for which a large, important voice was supplied to amplify the absurdity, that here was the logical effect that must come of the talkie. Scenes over prolonging themselves to the point of sheer meaninglessness while the characters speak their beastly lines. The talkie will be a matter of changing the film in order to suit the spoken matter. In other words, the film will play second fiddle to a noise you can have far more convincingly in the nearest Hippodrome. 50