Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000350 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 #:
000350
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 of new practical possibilities, and in its place established an epoch of automatic utilisation for high cultural dramas and other photographic performances of a theatrical nature. Utilised in this way, sound will destroy the art of mounting. For every addition of sound to portions of the mounting will intensify the portions as such and exaggerate their independent significance, and this will unquestionably be to the detriment of the mounting, which produces its effect not by pieces, but, above all, by the conjunction of pieces. 3. Only utilisation of sound in counterpoint relation to the piece of visual mounting affords new possibilities of developing and perfecting the mounting. The first experiments with sound must be directed towards its pronounced non-coincidence with the visual images. This method of attack only will produce the requisite sensation, which will lead in course of time to the creation of a new orchestral counterpoint of sight-images and soundimages. 4. The new technical discovery is not a chance factor in the history of the film, but a natural outlet for the advance guard of cinematographic culture, by which they may escape from a number of seemingly hopeless blind alleys. The first blind alley is the film text, and the countless attempts to include it in the scenic composition as a piece of mounting (breaking up of the text into parts, increasing or decreasing of the size of the type, etc.). The second blind alley is the explanatory items, which overload the scenic composition and retard the tempo. Every day the problems connected with theme and subject are becoming more and more complicated. Attempts to solve 12