Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000379 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 #:
000379
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 Hounds of War Were Unleashed A Song of Two Humans " — all that. But you can take Mother, and consider it. Consider it, because I went down to ^Munich to see it, and I saw it twice, after I had seen all the other ones that have been written about in Close Up, so it means more to me. Pudowkin, " with the Russian feeling for landscape " (as I have written till I long to review myself scathingly), has put in there several shots of the countryside which are not directly connected with the plot, using " directly " in its good old English sense of " superficially Good film isn't. Good film does not concern a few people acting out their story in a script as confined as a railway carriage, while the scenery rolls by, painted on rollers, outside. The scenery isn't scenery. It is as integral as they. You can't, even in a bad film, take the landscape and say " be good, be a background ", and in a good film, actors and background merge, are symbols meeting to form expression of what they are both manifestations of. Life. To be severely practical, these shots at the beginning of Mother give one the life these people lead. Naturally. But they give it mentally as well as in the more obvious sense, and how often do we get THAT? The trees and the pool, seen lovingly from many angles, and the mist rising from it, have their effect. This is one of the things we think we must carry, one of the perceptions, locked up, blocking the way, till we die. Pudowkin gives it us. Lets us in. Later, just before the strikers meet in the dell, there are some more of these scenes. To be strict, there are more of them than are needed. Just that one, when Bataleft' comes on the skyline, after one has waited (as his friends have waited — mark that), 33