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Close Up (Jul-Dec 1930)

Page scan 000395 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 #:
000395
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 planned a film of the fish docks, the live car " bringing in the live fish from the ponds and streams of midwest and farwest U.S.A. I have followed the fish since swaddling days. * # * What do our enthusiastic young men do? H. W. has made a film called A City Symphony — an ambitious and reminiscent title. It is a montage-film — if montage means, as it does not, the pell-mell piling of fragments. Herman knew of the use of the negative as positive ; so he loaded his film with that utility. Any device has its specific values. Haphazard and dense application of it is disastrous. H. W. should have asked ; " What is the pattern and tonal value of this bit of negative in the order of my film?" He employs the negative in instances where its value is lost. For instance, when the locomotive comes in in negative it is nothing but a frozen block. If H. had intended a frozen locomotive, O.K., that would have been ingenuity, but he was after a mobile something — and this was not it. The entire film is unorganized, no pattern, rhythm, formal intention, is apprehended. And as for the photographic work : it is a beginner's. I think of the Lods-Kauffman film, Aiijourdhui ; it sought parallels of movement, but destroyed the organization of the film by putting too much into it. Not knowing where to end the picture, they terminated it with an Etc. And that's how I feel about A City Symphony, it's all etcetera. First films like first poems should be writ and discarded : unless the light of inspiration is vivid in them. Paris has spoiled enough novices by professionalizing them. It is the prerogative of the swaddler to swaddle in this basin or that trundle. H. W. could first play in an " excentric " milieu making "stylized" 251