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 #:
000469
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 contemplate, stares steadily at the floor. Now the director might create the sense of tension by allo\ying the mother to make seyeral attempts to pass the paper through the grille, and in each case to draw back her hand. This effect he might heighten by close-ups of the hand. But he has invented a far more ingenious method. Near the guard stands a bowl of milk, and here a subject is introduced which draws the guard's attention. A cockroach has crawled into it and is trying to get out again. The guard sees it just as it is reaching the end of its eft'orts, the safe rim of the bowl. Grinning, he extends a finger and pushes it back again and while this happens the mother pushes the scrap of paper into her son's hand. Here the tension is enhanced by means of shifting it to a secondary incident, to something apparently trivial and of no consequence upon which yet hangs the life of a man. And how ingeniously is the incident devised ! It gives us a complete miniature of the horrible conditions of prison life, where food is befouled and infected ; it also repeats, as if accidentally, the main movement of the drama : here, as there, we are faced by a prisoner who strives to free himself and is thrust back. But that which brings destruction to the one is to the other the first step towards freedom. Here we have not only a contrast, but at the same time a presentiment. The son has fallen into hands from which there is no rescue, hands which pitilessly push back him who thought himself already rescued. Thus is this episode a prelude, for the son falls later under the bullets of the soldiers just as he has escaped from prison. But the relationship of the two episodes goes even deeper. It reaches to a depth where not the intelligence but only the feeling of the 13