Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Page scan 00017 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 #:
00017
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 11 EI SENS TEIN ! ALEX AND ROFF ! TISSE ! 100 Views of Fuji and so many camera shots made with the so pronounced tendency towards shooting two plans of depth — one through another (specially Fuji seen through a cobweb and Fuji seen through the legs, or Edgar Degas, whose startling series of compositions of women in the bath, modists and blanchisseuses, is the best school in which to acquire training ideas about space compositions within the limits of a frame — and about frame composition too, which, in these series, restlessly jumps from 1 :2 over 1 :1 to 2:1). This is, I think, the right point at which to quote one of Miles (1) arguments much more closely concerned with the pictorial element here discussed than with the physiological where it was intended to be placed. For Miles, " the whole thing (the inclination towards horizontal perception) is perhaps typified in the openings through which the human eye looks; this is characteristically much wider than it is high." Let us suppose for a moment this argument to be true in itself, and we can even provide him with a brilliant example for his statement, one even " plus royaliste que le roi." — Still it won't help him ! — But, by the way, the example is the typical shape of a tvpical Japanese landscape woodcut. This is the only type of standardised (not occasional) composition known, compositionally unlimited at the sides by the bounds of no frame, and typified in its vertical limit by a shaded narrow strip from lowest white to, at its topmost, darkest blue, rushing in this limited space through all the shades of this celestial colour.