Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000257
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:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP its absoluteness. The lesson of the films of Richter and Man Ray's first picture to the makers of films of machine sequences should be : the construction of a suitable material. Will not some absolutist construct the machine whose visualmotor rhythm he is to re-create on the pellicule for projection upon a screen ? As it is, most machine films remain documents and not completely absolute rhythms. For while the screw and bolt of a machine are essential to its original function, they may not serve the film. We have by now documented enough machine movements to create an absolute machine as material for the absolute film. It will not, finally, be a w^orking-machine, but may take the form of human semblance and find its source in those interesting sculptures of the German, Rudolf Belling, where human portraits are modelled upon machine-analogies. In the machine film, as in sculpture, spaces between solid parts are portions of the structural design. Belling is the sculptor who has best used actual hollows in the total design of his portrait. Nothing so interferes with the unity of an absolute film as the presence of a human figure not arranged into the entire absolute structure. It may be true, as one critic has observed, that the appearance of a human figure into a film of nonhuman contents relieves the spectator's tension. But that very relief is intrusion. i The absolute film of all films makes ^ In one of the most pleasing of the machine films, Deslav's The March of the Machines, at one point a man is visible behind the machinery. The austerity is broken for the moment and the mind needs to re-construct the absoluteness. 173