Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000387 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 #:
000387
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 the cadre, as compared with the elements of other shapes (case of " graphic tonaHty Play on the combining of the degrees of soft focussing or of different degrees of shrillness is the most typical example of tonal montage. As mentioned above, this case is based upon the dominating emotional sound of the piece. As examples may be instanced : the fogs in The Port of Odessa (the beginning of the mourning over the dead sailor in Potemkin), Here the montage is based exclusively on the emotional sound of the different pieces, i.e. on the rhythmic fluctuations, not producing spatial transposition. Here it is interesting that, side by side with the fundamental tonal dominant, there is also operating, as it were, a second, accessory rhythmic dominant of the pieces. This is, as it were, a connecting link of the tonal construction of a given scene with rhythmic tradition, the furthest development of which is tonal montage as a whole. Like rhythmic montage it is a special variety of metric montage. This secondary dominant is expressed in barely perceptible transpositional movements, as the agitation of the water ; in the slight rocking of the anchored vessels; in the slowly rising smoke; in the sea-gulls slowly descending into the water. Properly speaking, these too, are elements of a tonal order. Movements — transpositions according to tonal and not spatial-rhythmic characteristics. Here spatially incommensurable transpositions are combined in accordance with' their emotional sound. 259