Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00062 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 #:
00062
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 clairvoyant almost, and not sustained. L^nquestionabU' he has a fine cinematic consciousness. He might go farther than an}'bod}', given time and opportunitw He fails and attains together through apprehension that is more spontaneously psychic than intellectual. Because of it he sees farther, because of it he is profligate in his method, hurried and driven. On the other hand the discipline that would unify, would also leash rare freedom. He builds in Arsenal his atmosphere of woe and sullen doom through use of suspended action. Not through use of stillness. Suspended action. People have entered rooms, and suddenly they have stood still, stricken with some monstrousness of the A\'ar. People in the streets have suddenl}' ceased from moving, standing bent and ghostlv, while the wind makes lovely sculpture of their clothes. In a vast, empty field, furrowed for grain, an old stumblingwoman falls and does not get up. Each image is sustained, dreamy and desperate with repression. This breaks finallv in a senseless rebellion of despair. A man kicks his helpless, starved horse, a woman beats her hungry child. His foot, her arm become one — symbols. The kind woman, the gentle man, punishing the docile and inoffensive, because of doom. And at the end of it, nothing except to go on as before, the man leading his horse, the woman standing in the room. The same method taken to the Front. Soldiers, dark against a sky of heavy, unvigorous cloud, advance in silhouette. A soldier pulls away his gasmask, and laughinggas convulses him in shocking merriment while the hand of a buried man clutches up toward him. Advancing, a soldier on a hill stops and his rifle falls from his hands. His 40