Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00094 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 #:
00094
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 VP is momentarily threatened with a repetition of Hke disturbance ; a compulsion to accept and accommodate a brood of equally insistent and disorganizing cinema innovations. Already the natural-colour film is here. The popular response to its first public presentation, in the Warner Brothers' On With the Shoix\ has been no less enthusiastic than that which followed the showing of the pioneer vitaphone picture, The Jazz Singer. A few more like it, and the Crowd will demand that all pictures be in colour. The present black-and-whites will be as declasse as the dummies. And on the heels of this comes the authoritative announcement of the perfecting of stereoscopic projection. Two quite dissimilar devices for obtaining the same result have almost simultaneouslv come into being. One of them, the invention of Lorenzo de Riccio, head of the Paramount experimental laboratories, has for its basic feature a new form of screen, presenting a convex surface in place of the present flat one, and a screen that is changeable in size and dimensions, instead of being fixed within a definite, limited frame. The other comes out of the laboratories of the Radio Corporation of America. The result obtained by this invention is described as " natural-vision mammoth pictures.'' Characters and scenes are presented in life-like detail, depth, and perspective on a vast panoramic screen occupving the full width and height of any theatre proscenium space. And the visual ett>ct is such, that the need of different camera shifts — long shots, close-ups, etc. — is entirelv eliminated. The invention enlarges both film and camera lens to such an extent that enormouslv distant 64