Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000399 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 #:
000399
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 They become montage construction proper when they enter into relations of mutual conflict one with another (this occurs in the examples cited). In this, by the scheme of mutual relations, repeating one another, they proceed to a more and more strongly defined variety of montage, each organically ensuing from the other. Thus the transition from the metrical method to the rhythmic came about as a staging of the conflict between the length of the piece and the intra-cadre movement. The transition to tonal montage as the conflict between the rhythmic and the tonal principle of the piece. And finally, over-tone montage, as the conflict between the tonal principle of the piece (dominant) and the over-tone. These considerations afford us, above all, an interesting criterion for the appreciation of montage-construction from the point of view of its picturesqueness Picturesqueness is contrasted here with " cinematographicality aesthetic picturesqueness with physiological reality. To engage in argument concerning the picturesqueness of the cadre in cinematography is naive. It is typical of people possessing a fair aesthetic culture but absolutely unqualified from the cinematographic standpoint. To this type of reflection belong, for instance, the remarks concerning the cinema made by Casimir Malevich. The merest novice in cinematography would not think of analysing the " kinoi vdre " from the point of view of landscape painting. I think that the following condition should serve as a criterion of the " picturesqueness of the montage-construction in the broadest sense of the term : that the conflict should ^:.e resolved within one or other category of montage, without 263