Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000573 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 #:
000573
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 LP FREUD ON THE FILMS Far away back in April (1929) Close Up welcomed Metzner's UberfaJl, and described it as a beautiful flow of images without break or jerk, catching the essence of Freudian nightmare/' Later, L. Saalschutz, in a most interesting article, discussed the film in its relation to the unconscious. There remains Germaine Dulac's The SeaShell and the Clergyman. When Mr. Stuart Davis, the enterprising, had it brought hopefully to London, we hastened to investigate. Now that so man}' stage plays are being screened it was good to see a psychoanalytical exposition of thought, for the stage cannot show the layers upon layers of simultaneous consciousness. The stage cannot acquire the mobility of the subconscious, or put over as effectively the utter grotesqueness, so essential to dream states, which trick photography can capture on the screen. Piscator, and others, have tried by splitting the proscenium into sections, but the results have always been ponderous, they lack this flow, this ebb, this rhythm of the cinema. Germaine Dulac's picture begins with a door, a high and narrow slit of a door, casting a shaft of light on to the floor of blackness. Here is the same lesson that I found in The 399