Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000271 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 #:
000271
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 without regard to the level of the theme as experience, it is contradictory of unity. The motion picture has been too occupied with the spectator. This shifting of the concern from the intrinsic film to what is fallaciously called communication has been one of the chief causes for the non-establishment of a film unity. It is true that a film is meant to be experienced by some one other than the creator of it. But experience — the systemic, ideational experience of art — is never a product of the intentional effect. That is a consideration out of the intrinsic work. But if the artist is faithful to the highest demands of his subject-theme, as articulated in the construction, experience is the result. That is purity. That is unity. That is the aesthetic as against the rudimentarily psychologic, which, in the film construction, is a physical attack. The film, on the whole, remains no more than a physical attack, and the talking film, as it is produced to-day, has further lowered the level of this physical attack. The view of filmmaking as effect makes for passive (even apathetic spectators), the view of film-making as the strict realization of the intrinsic makes for active, completely participating spectators. The film, because it does not dwell upon itself, does not realize itself. In all lands it disdains idea. Therefore, it does not achieve complete conversion into a final form, therefore does not achieve unity — hence not the experience that is art. The entire mind of internationalism, whether it is the large sale of the American commercial viewpoint or the propagandistic reduction of the Russians, thwarts this penetration of the intrinsic theme and its re-making into the form of the film. The film to-day, only very, very seldom attains