Close Up (Jan-Jun 1929)

Page scan 00062 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 #:
00062
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 in three stages. Far off, nearer and then near. It is sometimes very successful, sometimes too slow. Once at least he reverses it, showing you first of all a woman standing by a hut watching her son ride off. The second shot, further off, is the same, with distance between, so that remoteness begins, and the quiet undulations of the land. The last has only the now familiar miles of empty, barren-looking hillocks, and far off the tiny block of the hut, and the even tinier figure, hemmed in and enclosed by loneliness. This is clever and poignant, but two or three times in one film is enough. And sometimes the camera was oblique for no reason. Which is very like trying to be clever, proving one maintained critical coolness. Certainly the mesh was loose now and then, and certainly one was able to peep through. It would be pert or narrow to allow this to take importance. The fabric, as a whole, is something that matters so vitally. It is, indeed, an amazing thing to plunge from the half-lewd idiocy of the average film to this. The contrast is a kind of crevasse over which there is no bridge. The average film concerns itself with things that don't matter happening to people who don't matter, set in a treacley irreality of sex-charged commonness. This mildly pernicious grime is spread out in ever-thickening layers until finally, if something — some storm over Europe — does not invade the cinema manufactories, sweeping it away like the invading army on the hurricane in Pudovkin's film, it will choke every one of us. I see that Storm Over Asia will be considerably modified for Berlin. The invading army " is probably not stressed there as British, the commander's scare-crow, well-bred wife will be allowed to be a vaguer symbol. I have a feeling, 40