Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000678 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 #:
000678
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 speech. To join speech to his form would create a hvbrid. But Carl Dreyer sees speech as essential to his method.* In short, it is not a matter of liking or disliking the talking film that will determine its survival. It is a matter of finding artists who will achieve their full expression through it. What is inevitable is — intrinsically and ultimately — good. What is the intrinsic talkie? By utilising it we will attain to the ultimate talkie. The aesthetic jargon of the last ten vears of cinema limits nothing but itself. }^Ir. Betts calls the talkie not a him, but a " speech plus film.'' All right, it is a speech plus film. That is nothing more than saying the silent film is one kind of cinema (let us call it " film and the talking film another kind (call it, if you will, '* speech plus film.") If ]\Ir. Betts intends to imply by that that speech is supplementary, I can only say he is thinking of the ideal silent film troubled by an intrusion. He cannot vision a compound unit of visual and spoken utterance. For the entire key is " utterance." I am extending my heresy and at the same time contradicting Mr. Kiesler who * Leon Poirier has called, in Photo-Cine, the sonorous film a bluff. He finds sound suflicing for the informative documents, for " a spectacle not meant to move the audience. He finds it, however, practically impossible for the expression of " the multiple and delicate nuances of the sentiments, the emotions, the impressions .... The amelioration of the quality of sound will not change the situation. It is the conception itself of the sonorous films that must be modified." As to the talking film, well, has the colored photo dethroned painting? Movement is the principal essential of the cinema. The sonorous film will enrich the music, its veritable progress will be the improvement of the film's musical atmosphere. Poirier is talking here only of the simple film, the film's musical atmosphere indicates his attitude there is certainly a more serious error in this conception than in the sonorous film conceived as a unit. That is the sole justifiable con 464