Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000205 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 #:
000205
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 for jobs. Disquieting as it may seem, we have reached a point where there is nothing ahead short of a fundamental renewal. Theoretically, to-day, any intelligent spectator should be able to make a good film. He no longer has the right to blunder. But where would be the interest of such an undertaking ? Everything must be forgotten. We must make a fresh start. Explore, invent, find means hitherto unthought-of . Otherwise we risk dying of perfection. And the speech-film, by virtue even of its monstrous blundering, its sins against good taste, its amazing lack of intelligence, the results of groping forward through an initial darkness, is a thing of promise. In Broad-way Melody, which on the whole w^as nothing more than second-rate melodrama, there were moments of a hitherto unexpected beauty. As Rene Clair remarked wath such sympathetic simplicity in a recent article in Pour Vous: the actors speak, but you do not see their mouths in close-up and you are not tempted to pay too much attention to the vicissitudes of synchronisation (after all a subordinate matter) — but you see the faces of those who listen. And is not that altogether of the cinema ? It is said that speech-films are of the theatre just because they are spoken. But has anyone yet heard shadows speak on a stage or a close-up of a face expressing itself in words ? I leave it to others to enumerate still more interesting examples of the absence of parallelism betw^een film and stage. This search for fresh means, this naive clumsiness, will ultimately give us w^orks of a splendid simplicity. Bad films, so long as they are silent, are endured by a public with an 137