Close Up (Jan-Jun 1929)

Page scan 00052 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00052
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP notwithstanding, it was a pictorial record we were given, not a moving dynamic art. We were allowed to look on, but we were not made to feel. We were spectators of a strange humanity going through the monotony of the daily round, having destruction for its task in place of building ; laying waste, the chosen alternative to tillage. Come day, go day, a hopeless fortitude. A situation without origin, without objective. A confusion to which sub-titles often added instead of giving it clarity and coherence. With Mother it was otherwise. Pudowkin soon swept us from our seats and forced us into becoming emotional participants. Nor were we allowed for one moment to retire even to the curbstone complacently to look on. We were on one side or the other. For or against. Whether or not normally we share his morality or dissent from his politics, for the time being w^e are his. In his determinism there is no place for the realism of the onlooker, only for the reality of the participant. To him human motive is an affect of causation. Until we not only meet but join his characters it is his object to recreate causation in us. Then we can no more withhold our sympathy than if we were reacting to personal experience. Thence their life is ours and we are carried along with them. Always he is insistent, knocking and rousing ; knocking and stimulating. Making our objective inevitably alike to theirs. All known technique is made to subserve this end. When that fails the ceaseless pressure of his necessity mothers the inventions that make Pudowkin's technique his. There were hints by some who disliked the propaganda in Mother that the 80