Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000175 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 #:
000175
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP had the Movietone short of King Alfonso, which was easy and bright and natural, and we had Jlliite Shado-a.'s, which did a lot to me then, but won't do so much to people who have seen a lot of the later ones before it is generallv released in February. But there we got away a bit from dialogue, and had sound going on, not representing the images, but going along complementary to them ; we had the mike outdoors, too. I know we also had a close-up of ]\Ionte Blue, and the sound that came from his laughing was very small and distant, but that is so obvious a flaw it is hardly worth discovering. The mike went further outdoors with In Old Arizona, the first talkie " Western Here there were noises, life-noises, hooves and clatter and dishes .... you remember, one of the high-lights of the picture was that you saw AND heard a bacon being boiled with its egg. I know^ this was absurd, I know we all screamed that w^e didn't want to hear what we saw, but something else, and that Interference marked something or other because we watched a person phoning, and heard the other person at the other end. But it is true that the people had to show us this was possible for us, the wise ones, to be good enough to point out just when it was good to hear the frying bacon (I am sorry, I said boiled just now). There are obviously moments when it might be. When food is being cooked, something boils over ... it is then the sound that attracts the attention of people w^ho may be engaged in drama in another room. The sound is all that is needed, a little picture of an over-boiling saucepan is not really needed, and isn't specially cinematic. A film is much smoother if sound lets you keep on with the visually main theme, instead of swooping about. We have c 115