Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Page scan 00012 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1931
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00012
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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G CLOSE VP And on the other hand industrial culture too sometimes brings tribute to this " despised form." She throws the interminable Brooklyn Bridge to the left of Manhattan and attempts to surpass it by Hudson Bridge to the right. She expands without end the length of the body of poor Puffing Billy to that of the Southern Pacific locomotives of to-day. She lines up endless out-spread chains of human bodies (as a matter of fact — legs) in the innumerable rows of music-hall girls, and indeed what boundary is there to the other horizontal victories of the age of electricity and steel ! Just as, in contrast to her pantheistic horizontal tendencies, mother nature provides us at the edge of Death Valley or Majave Desert with the huge 300 feet height of the General Sherman and General Grant trees, and the other giant Sequoias, created (if we may believe the geography school books of every country) to serve as tunnels for coaches or motor cars to pass through their pierced feet. Just as, opposed to the infinite horizontal contredanse of the waves, at the edge of the ocean, we encounter the same element shot upright to the sky as geysers. Just as the crocodile basking extendedly in the sun is flanked by upright standing Giraffe in the company of the Ostrich and Flamingo — all three clamouring for a decent screen frame appropriate to their upright shape ! So neither the horizontal nor the vertical proportion of the screen alone is ideal for it. Actuality, as we saw, in the forms of nature as in the forms of industry, and in the encounters together of these forms, we have the fight, the conflict of both tendencies . And the screen, as a faithful mirror, not only of conflicts emotional and tragic, but equally of conflicts psychological and optically spacial, must be an appropriate battle ground for the skirmishes of both these optical-by-view, but profoundly psychological-by-meaning space tendencies of the spectator. What is it that, by readjustment can in equal degree be made the figure of both vertical and horizontal tendencies of a picture? The battlefield for such a fight is easily found — it is the square — the space form of rectangle exemplifying the quality of equal length of its dominant axes. The only and unique form equally fit by alternate suppression of right and left, or of up and down, to embrace all the multitude of expressive rectangles of the world. Or used as a whole to engrave itself by the " cosmic " imperturbability of its squareness in the psychology of the audience. And this specially in a dinamic succession of dimensions from a tiny square in the centre to the all embracing of a full sized square of the whole screen ! The " dinamic " square screen, that is to say one providing in its dimensions the opportunity of impressing, in projection, with absolute grandeur every geometrically conceivable form of the picture limit.