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 #:
000383
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
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 imagery is in successive images and depends on cutting. This is the film that one of the American publicity-fan magazines dismisses as St. Petersburg destroyed by trick camera angles But it is the ice in Mother that I would insist on, for it is an instance most easily understandable to those who have not seen the film, and it shows what I w^ould emphasise, the bringing of the mind's workings as definite factors to be reckoned with into pla}^, the curious tangible fluid workings are recognised as something that can be interpreted in themselves, not through the actions they cause. Life — I mean realised, analysed, lived life — consists of the actual world with our own superimposed, actual living with our own reactions to that superimposed. And though the actual world is the foundation, and the real world finds fulfilment in terms of it, those terms are transformed in the process. Things mean this, things mean that. There is something more. You do not give the real world by using simply the sketchy symbols of the actual. Shells are shells to one race; so they are to another, but because of that they are also money to it. Layer on layer, often transparent but not always interchangeable, and you don't reach the crystal ones on top simply by reproducing the bottom one. What is missing from ordinary films, what isn't in Four Sons and is in Mother, what isn't, by a long shot, in The Last Command and is in The End of St, Petersburg, is this world we make of the world we know, the world that means among all the world that is. And Pudowkin's use of imagery, implicit in all good Russian films, but explicit in his, gives us a world compounded in just proportion of the two. 37