Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000261 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 #:
000261
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP to be compared with the first airplane or the earhest locomotive. The chief answer to this is that the producers of audible films have shown no skill for profiting bv the simplest lessons of the silent films or, for that matter, of the spoken stage, and that the examples so far offered have revealed every weakness the esthetic theories of silence have suspected. In addition, the actors for the talking pictures, recruited from the ranks of screen players who tried to substitute voice for pantomime, have, without exception, been terrible. So far we have had Tenderloin, in which the dialogue was so incredible that it was laughed off the screen; Glorious Betsy, which had but a few talking sequences, all ineft'ective ; The Lion and the Mouse, a futile photograph of a stage antique; and Lights of Xeu' York, done entirely with spoken dialogue, which was a fifth-rate melodrama, badly done. On the other hand, the Movietone news-reel and such short subjects as Bernard Shaw's talk have been highly interesting. Altogether, the evidence so far presented is that the talking film as applied to the full length photoplay or to any other purpose, save that of record, is entirely ineft'ective, dramatically and esthetically. But it must at least be said for it that it can't possibly be as bad as has so far seemed. Certainly it deserves a better test than Tenderloin or Lights of Xew York. B 17