Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000179 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 #:
000179
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 when one of tlieni married a millionaire. Thev were as e'ood as he was, they had their pride, they were, O, indeed theA^ were and how, the middle-classes. And it was all talk. Talk in a little cramped room, washing the dishes, avoiding the furniture, trying to get a few minutes alone with a member of the family and being interrupted because the table had to be laid, or the door answered. This was something different from the plain canned-play of The Hometo^K^ners, where thev just grouped in front of the microphone and wished thev were on the stage and what was the camera for, anA^how? The Idle Rich as it was given us, couldn't have been given by the stage or by the old film. It said, the microphone gives us talk, and it rules out action and much change of scene, so it talked and talked in one room, and built up plausible characters by talk, by talkie. This wasn't a good film, isn't new film, but it was a kind of progress because it was a logical carrA'ing to a conclusion. But talkies could be fluid, could get movement into them. There were good sequences in The Perfect Alibi. There was a lot of bunk, which would have been there anyway, but there were good sequences. And if }'ou writhe at the inanitv of dialogue, remember that that is only another way of acknowledging the expressiveness of talkies. That inanity in the dialogue would have been implied in the silent film; if you didn't notice it then, the silent film was not so sharp. Dialogue has simply got to be better, it isn't wrong in itself, except that hundred per cent, literal dialogue isn't wanted, has nix to do with cinema. Fashions in Love did things, very useful things with sound. An amusing drawing-room comedy, with an interesting pattern of sound, ruined only by 119