Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000249 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 #:
000249
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 It is, then, to the achievement of such effects as this, that the intensive study of film cutting is devoted ; not to produce something brilliant and impressionistic, rather to give realism and the reaction of an actual participant. One often reads of the camera being used as an eye. The Russian method uses it not as an eye, but as a brain. It darts surely and exactly from one vital thing to another vital thing. Its penetration is acute and deep, and very rarely (in its best films never) led astray by side-issues or sentimentality. It is only right to say again that not all, indeed very many of their films do not touch this level. I have, for instance, never seen a more dreadful film that Tzar and Poet, dealing with the life of Pouschkin. Their method, to begin with, is for now and the future, and does not lend itself to bygone periods. The cinema obviously belong to to-day. But, this aside, Tsar and Poet remains in my mind as one of the really boring hours I have spent in a projection room. But when it comes to Ten Days (October), The End of St. Petersburg, Two Days, The Peasant Women of Riazanj, etc., there are no words to express their value not only as films, but as contribution to the progressive thought of the world. And to have made one such film would entitle them to the respect of the world. As it is, there are many, and so we are able to safely feel that the future of pure cinema is safe in their hands, and that the excrescent and reactionary strivings of talking films, and talking-colour films need not unduly disturb us. KENNETH MACPHERSON. 13