Close-Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close-Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000381
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP mean nothing. They are properties. But with Bataleff it is not just a matter of chase and escape. He IS being chased and he DOES escape, but he THINKS of the river, and the fact that it is spring, because there are things he knows, the world within serves the world without as it presses on him. And we get both. So all this imagery has not been just decoration, so many epithets. It has been a theme, a decorative theme, dehberately blended to serve its use. That is where its beauty comes in. Ice and trees and pretty scenes, so boring when flung into a lilm as in Love's Crucifixion^ have use, are beautiful. We are not cheated, and asked to admire something static. And, incidentally, in passing, to air a bee of my own, anything static, persistently so, as a string of decoration must be, is not film. Film is not garlands, however well made, but branches, buds growing to leaf, blossom, fruit. Going on, not swinging lifelessly in externally applied winds. This kind of imagery abounds in Russian films. It makes them up. Each is linked to something, not taken out, uprooted and held for exhibition. There is a puppy in Two Days, there are the riverwreaths in Dorf der SUnde, Kerenskv mounting the stairs in Ten Days. Potemkin, that film that ahvays seems to have been talked to death until one sees it again, opens with some shots of the sea that have the same relation to the film as the landscape ones in Mother, but such imagery is more native to Pudowkin than to Eisenstein, of whom, as I hope to write on him later, I will only say now that he works on the epic, not the lyric, scale, and the other scenes that are symbolical in Potemkin — the flapping of the tent, the twirling of the parasols, the gathering crowds, the putting out of the sailing 35