Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000261 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000261
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 Mr. Matthew Josephson, an American writer and erstwhile film-enthusiast of the late Broom/* saw in the American western film his ideal of film-movement. This was an enthusiasm generated by the French dadaists, and it is still being uttered in England — as yet, a decade behind in its filmjudgments — by a writer in a weekly periodical. The movement of the American film has been movement, it is true, but the movement only of an object and not of the integral film. To clarify my meaning, I should like to refer again to Carl Dreyer and Jeanne d'Arc, Mr. Dreyer believes now that in the latter portion of his film he should have graded the bold images in first, second and third plans : the head first, then head and torso, then full body. This may have reduced the dramatic psychological attack upon the spectator which was so powerfully effected by the succession of first plans, but — and this is a first rule of a unity ! — the film and not the spectator, determines the structure of the film. The succession and alternation of first, second and third plans are part of the aesthetic organization of the film, its plastic, rhythmic movement. Dynamics is just another name for the climacteric construction and organization of these various elements. It refers to the accumiulative forward march of the film. The drama refers to the narrative source (the literary experience) which the spectator receives in its final converted form through the repetitive, alternating, varying procession whose elements I have briefly considered above. There is no single kind of motion, no one sort of dynamics, no only form of rhythm, no one and only category of film. I have thought it necesary to consider, if only for a moment, these inclusive film-terms to protect the film from the glib 177