Start Over

Close Up (Jul-Dec 1930)

Page scan 000387 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 #:
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP the distinct qualities of the new form, namely, " ccncentration and expressiveness."* He, however, inherited the academic limitation of seeing processes as terminated things at the moment of inspection, rather than as forms in evolution. The movie has had few^ critics who have seen it as a form in evolution. Of all who have written in English, Alexander Bakshy alone has been perspicacious. Kallen could not see the film beyond its rudiments in the melodrama and " churlish comedy."! His attitude was snobbish, patrician, but not inaccurate for the time. The " primitive phenomenon " of the film was as Kallen saw it. He said : " The rival of the musical comedy has appeared and with it a totally new and ^ Kallen saw as another distinct characteristic of the movie " rapidity of movement." By this he evidently meant speed." Critics have insisted upon " speed " as an essential of the film — it is a quality of the " primitive phenomenon." Another characteristic he designated was the " dominant aesthetic paradox," the customary in unaccustomed media. This may be looked upon in two ways : through the eyes of 1910, as seeing the new art treating of the materials of the old and, by this juxtaposition creating an " aesthetic surprise " ; or, through the constant eyes of art, as seeing in the film a means of disturbing dessicate logic, in the sense that Eisenstein speaks of the " pathetic treatment of non-pathetic material." So that Kallen has listed three categories of principles: the law of art, the law of the cinema, the law of the film's first form. + The 1910 attitude toward comedy in the cinema is shared by the German, Professor Konrad Lange, who said in address (1912) before the Diirer Bund in Tubingen that the comic or grotesque film depended entirely upon eccentricity. It could not be compared, he said, to the art of the circus-clown, for the latter spoke once-in-a-while and uttered witty remarks. (It is then the circus-clown is least the artist.) Chaplin had not yet appeared by 1912 to disprove the charge that the film could not carry wit. Both Kallen and Lange saw speechlessness as an obstacle to anything but churlishness in the com.ic film. To Lange the comic film was a " Schundfilm " — rubbish-film; its humor " Hamipelmannhumor, " jumping-jack humor. He must have had in mind Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops and Ford Sterling. They were basic, folk jesters. 243