Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00088 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 #:
00088
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 very small camera, I forget the size, though it must have been for a plate not bigger than three-and-a-half inches by two-and-a-half. All his pictures are enlargements. What have you done? " " I have just made a little picture. Please do not take any notice. . . . This is a picture I made in the Netherlands." Presently the lights are turned off. Mr. Casparius will show me a film he made during the turning of Pz0 Palii. There are the peaks of Piz Palii. And there is an avalanche, silver chuting against the sun. If the film is as lovely as that " But here is Peterson, roped, a prisoner, and men are unceremoniously throwing spadesful of snow at him. A lovely little work-film, but how it destroA S the sense of danger and calamity so carefully contrived in the FanckPabst master-film ! Not that it was meant to, indeed, but it is well known that the most tragic scenes on the screen are those which have occasioned greatest laughter in the making. Who could remain serious with cocoa dribbling from his bandages? The prisoners of the ^yhitc Hell are the merriest of victims between the scenes ! But the camera work I " lsl\ camera is an Ica." Whv buv Debries and Bell-and-Howells ? The work of Casparius is well known throughout Germany. In the twelve months during which he has practised it, he has made several thousand studies. Advertising studies, stills for various films, portrait studies, experimental studies, landscape and seascape studies. The main characteristic of his work is its quality of movement, of change. He does not stress durability, but captures the transient. He seeks this deliberately in a choice that emphasises this quality, either directly or by suggestion. 58