Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00039 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1930
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00039
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 directorial attitudes. No good can come from submission because of expedience. That is a form of moral compromise which is a detriment to artistic achievement. I have felt such a confused mind in The Great Gabbo, directed by James Cruze and starring Erich von Stroheim. The film is listless and diffident in construction, the lighting is bad, and the full use of the ventriloquist-and-dummy opportunity for sound-sight counterpoint is never even suspected. The resultant is a simplism with very little of either intuitive or intelligent sense of the new medium. It is a conglomerate of various sources with no central structural intention. And after all Cruze is not one of our least. Perhaps Stroheim should have directed. I found his performance, as well as role, a bit painful. It made me a little ashamed to watch an adult and not inferior person taking the thing seriously. I remember Cruze as an actor — The Million Dollar Mystery — perhaps he should have been Gabbo.. But then with Stroheim directing the result w^ould have been a probable exaggeration of the importance of the material plus some Viennese commentary. So let us spare a bad thing and ask no more ! The best-planned talkie I have yet seen is Hitchcock's Blackmail, There was some sense of the necessitv of the long silent interval, and of reiteration, even though the plan was elementary, obvious and the reiteration too psychological.'' The English are inflating the importance of the film. It has no real meaning and is poor suspensefilming (as poor as Bulldog Drummond and The Man with the Tree-Frog in this respect). Its competence is only competence after all, for Hitchcock is not a singularly 17