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 #:
000529
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 forge : the shaping of bars of metal the manifest content . . . noise the latent content. And how successfully was latent content " condensed " (to use the new Freudian terminology) by the visual mechanism of the " mix " into succeeding shots of cams and tappets higher up on the machine? The noiserhythm was ever present in that sequence. I am in doubt as to whether this noise-rhythm constitutes real " counterpoint Very well, here surely should be sound? But I say not. Why demand a real sound counterpart any more than a real wetness counterpart to a rain-storm scene ? The last thing was, quite fittingly, the exhaust of gases from a tube . . . still pulsing rhythmically . . . the breathing of the machines as they march. Suggestively, the tube was away from the face. ^ * ^ In this film the camera revealed itself through the medium of its limitations. Certain motions were not of suitable rhythm for cinema. In one shot a flying weight governor stood still because its rhythm w^as a simple multiple of sixteen per second. This was observable partially in other shots also. * ^ ¥^ Are we then to conclude that Deslaw has addressed us primarily on a sort of " mind-dynamics "... presenting a series of impressions of mind-motion, inertia, balance, relativity, and what not, far more vital and understandable (to most) than the incomprehensibilities of the practical mathematician? I think so. What a field there is opened for more work of this kind ! L. Saalschutz. 363