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 #:
000384
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 The imagery by which he attains this is different from superimposing the actual causes of a state of mind, as with the sheep and the clock and the chair in White Gold. It is different from what Pick did with waves in New Year's Eve and from what has been done by Lubitsch, whom also I want to consider. These are the world without and to be gratefully received. They show us the knocking at the mind's door. Pudowkin lets us in. The force of apparently decorative scenes and flashes in one of his films comes from within. The creaking chair is a rational symbol of GoudaFs irritation. Pudowkin would give us the psychological symbol, and the two are not the same. Think what this means. If all the extraordinary tunnels down which the mind travels, like a monkey, with an experience, leaping from branch to branch, if all the leaves can be lifted up, disclosing the vista beyond, as well as the casual fruit beneath ; if all the events we bring to an event and barter for it and weigh against it, shall we or not respond, and if we do, enrich it with ; if all this can be given — and Pudowkin is only at the beginning — what can we expect ? vShall we be starved any more? Irritated, dissatisfied, twisted, putting up with old perfunctory symbols any more ? Putting up with stories that don't fit life as w^e know it, and because we never see that life almost think we are the only ones that do know it, trying therefore to fit it in with those old symbols of I love you, you love me, so both are happy, like a foot into a toosmall shoe because, after all, it must have SOME protection? Surely this, to be rational, gives us a world that is not one-sided (and every kind of world is round), a world we know, not a world we are surprised others seem to think they 38