Close Up (Jul-Dec 1930)

Page scan 000315 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1930
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000315
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 sunlight, dream of revitalising their creative energy at a purer source. Does not ^Nlurian make common cause with Flaherty of the exotic islands, apostle of the natural cinema? * * Cutting through life's surrounding atmosphere the documentary cinema has shown us its unsuspected aspects. For example : the rhythms of the life of a great town, the synthesis of the universe attempted by Walter Ruttmann in La Symphonie d^une Grande Ville and La Melodie du Monde, and Rene Clair's La Tour and Joris Ivens' Le Pont d'Acier, poetic frescoes of metallurgy. And the curious picturesqueness — not in the Michelin sense — of Lacombe's La Zone, Poirier's reels, La Croisiere blanche, La Croisiere noire, evocations of journeys one may never make, the grandeurs of natural decor felt by Epstein {UAffiche, La Belle Xivernaise), nostalgia of Norwegian fiords and the distant horizons of the FarWest, the strange personality of an object or a machine, seeming suddenly to take on life when thrown upon the screen. And the invisible made visible by the miracle of acceleration, (La Vie des Plantes) and of slowmotion, {UEclatement d'nne hnlle de savon). Films such as Gardiens de Phare, Tour au Large, Finis Terrae, certain efforts of Abel Gance, dominated by the gigantic personality of the sea : that mask with a thousand expressions one might watch, armxcd with a camera, for a life-time. * * * It is especially in the documentary film rather than in the studio-film — where, in the interest of the objective exigencies, everything must, or at any rate should, be re-created — that we may distinguish what is photogenic from what is not. D 203