Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000274 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 #:
000274
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 long and burns his fingers. The day's take may be tinned in the usual manner, dispatched for the laboratories in parcels covered with blue crosses and seals, but the developer finds that all the film has stuck together 1 Tropical heat makes the celluloid " sweat The negative should be left for a day exposed to the air in a sealed dark-room, with the additional safeguard of a large inverted tin, then it may arrive in good condition ; perhaps with more certainty than if the film had been exposed in the Arctic regions. An explorer setting up his camera amidst ice, polar bears and stray topical boys " would be rewarded with a negative interlaced with wavering lines and decorated with representations of forked lightning, if no experienced friend had warned him to put an electric bulb in the camera. An electric bulb, lit by portable batteries, keeps the inside of the camera at an even temperature. A light inside the camera ! What about fogging all the film? Not if the bulb is covered with black paper and painted black. Heat and cold therefore disqualify celluloid. The nervous might like to add their wail about the safety of the general public, the deadlv combustibility of celluloid; the reverent would be sure to talk about the debilitating atmosphere of the film safe. Film when it is kept for any length of time becomes brittle and unfit for the projector ; so that the artistic repertoire cinema has more difficulties to contend with than the mere securing of suitable pictures. Every promising film that is made to-day is doomed from the hour that it is released, and the classics of the past will soon be lost to us for ever. Paper would hardly keep any better, it would not be as pliant as new celluloid and it would tear, but is there any need for our scientists to brag about progress ? 30