Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000683 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 #:
000683
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 image fullest physical transmission. But in the integrated compound-film, the moment counts only as the portion of an inclusive entity. I must insert one exception here, and that is the film of broad comedy. The effect becomes rhetoric in a comic film, and rhetoric is the very nature of cinema comedy. The devices or effects in Clair's Two Timid Souls are justified by the nature of the film, and therefore satisfy its unity. That is why I prefer that film to The Italian Straw Hat in which effects or rhetoric is not employed. Facile fluidity is not a virtue in a farce-comedy, how^ever virtuous it is in a film like Vanina. Hardly had I suggested the possibility of Shakespeare in the compound cinema, when announcement was made of the Fairbanks-Pickford plan to film The Taming of the Shrew. Within the same period Glassgold quoted Griffith on the dialogue as hope of the movie. Euripides in the talkie, said Griffith, enthralled. And Glassgold scoffed. Dialogue indeed ! His words of sarcasm are summed up in these words I quote from an article of mine : Attach a phonograph to Mona Lisa?" I, however, was referring to the cinema's first form of non-oral images. The compound cinema is not phonograph to a flat film, it is a unity of independent structure. I do not know the nature of the FairbanksPickford tentative, nor Griffith's conception. I suspect an error in the latter because of the use of the word dialogue." Not a dialogue-film but a blank verse, recitative film, in which the verbal essence is extracted and refined to meet with the image projected. Only a great poet can re-render in the cinema the great poets of the drama. But may we not hope ? 469