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 #:
000467
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 ■ riddle, and when next I saw the film I paid particularly close attention to the scene that had so profoundly impressed him and that vet in itself seemed so slight and so incidental. Picture the situation : on the one hand the guard standing to attention, firm, stern, mechanised by discipline — on the other the sailors driven hither and thither in the maze of the conflicting emotions of rage, despair and long-practised obedience. When the captain has the sail-cloth brought along, tension rises to its height and our sympathies are concentrated upon the question as to which will be the stronger, human pity or the force of discipline. Will the guard shoot or refrain? When at this moment one of the guard — whom so far we have considered as a creature bereft of individuality by drilling, a mere mechanically functioning unit — is dissociated from the group and, by means of a movement (independent and not dictated by discipline), by looking round at the sail-cloth as it is being carried past, betrays, however slightly, his character of a human-being involved in the proceedings, our question begins to be answered. We know that even the guard, in its totality an unfeeling machine, is made up of men capable of sympathy, and we begin to hope. In order to produce this moment of extreme tension it was of the highest importance that the transformation should appear suddenly and unexpectedly at the moment of greatest danger, at the sounding of the word of command : fire. Only thus could come about the powerful release carrying each spectator along W'ith it. But for this operation, sudden only in its arrival, the spectator's mind must be cunningly prepared. Something within him must have desired, surmised, anticipated an event which otherwise would remain outside 11