Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00060 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 #:
00060
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 collar and handkerchief and stretches his hand out for the red flag stuck in the tractor bonnet. Fingers restrain him. ^larfa hfts her apron and lets him tear strips off one of her many petticoats and puts the red flag carefully away in her dress. Finally, the tractor marches forward triumphantly, dragging all the carts of the village behind it, up hill and down hilh overthrowing all the fences, while the villagers cheer. This changes to a vision of Russia covered with tractors and to a flnal close up of Marfa herself driving one, and falling into the arms of the male leader of the village in the best " happy end " tradition. Perhaps it is the attempt to be at once popular (to appeal to the villagers) to treat Russia in a statistical manner, and yet at the same time to have a storv, that has broken The General Line into sequences. I, certainlv, have no quarrel with the sociological import of the him. From a limited experience of village life, no people are so hostile to progress as a rule, as the farmers. But I should have preferred to see The General Line done in a more impersonal manner; not Lapkina, not Fomka, but village after village in mud and waste and superstition, the jeering as the tractor arrived, as it stuck in the swamp, as it triumphantly gathered the harvest. Or else more personal, with" concentration on Lapkina, making her not a svmbol at one moment and a woman at another, as she tends to be actually, but putting the matter more from her point of view and less, therefore, from the statistical. As it is, it is never quite a story nor quite a document. Its very greatness makes it easy to criticise. There are parts of it as sentimental as Dickens. Which is not to say 38