Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00057 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 #:
00057
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 question of the increase of food production in Russia was the vital question of the hour (as it still is), then the him was left while Ten Days was completed, and finally work was resumed when the " general line had passed from agriculture to machinery, from cows to tractors. The film contains one great innovation — the rhvthmic use of sub-titles. Xo film has opened more powerfully. Ten, not ten, 100, not a hundred, one hundred million of cultureless, illiterate peasants is the legacy left to Russia by the prerevolution regime. Beat of numbers and words increases to open upon fields black under shadow and fields sweeping clear of shadow. In a leaky hut, women, children, men, black with flies, lie on planks among their animals, only an inch or two above mud floors the rain dripping through the roof has made into a swamp. Russia is before the eyes, Siberia, vast continent of land space, the terrible problem that ought to be the world's, and is but Russia's, how^ to break down this ignorance, this apathy, this thing that is far less noble than the animals. The old and the poor have no means of ploughing the fields except by makeshift methods or by hand. An old man and woman are harnessed to a plough. ]\Iarfa Lapkina starts out to beg. A fat rich peasant sleeps on his porch and flies crawl over his ear. His wife, a statue to sadism, comb in hand, stares mockinglv from the doorway. Marfa Lapkina is turned away. But life cannot go on — it is not possible to live further in this manner. A meeting. This is perhaps the finest moment in the film. Lapkina demands a communal farm where each shall help the other. " A woman an old peasant face sneers, " vulgar " laughs another, Soviet tricks a third whispers.