Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1931
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00033
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:
November 07, 2023
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CLOSE UP 27 View of the model. Vue du modele. Ansicht des Modells. THE THEATRE OF THE FUTURE AND THE TALKING FILM The development of the theatre after the war is looking for a perfection of technique, whose supremacy in every respect is a singular characteristic sign of our time. It is the technique that gives to modern life its mark and style. It plays the part of a sort of modern Dionysus, which brings to light a new kind of performance : the cinema with its dynamic element, time, unlimited space and pathos of movement. The theatre with its verbal ballast and its routine does not correspond anymore to the spirit of our time and the spectator satiated by "word" is thirsting for dumbness and for visual impressions ; he begins to abandon the theatre for the cinema. " If all the spectators of the cinema do not visit the theatre, almost all spectators of the theatre are visiting the cinema " as CI. Berton says in his interesting meditations about the modern theatre. (Nouvelles Litteraires of September 8, 1928.) The theatre, though having perceived the competition of the cinema, this new mystery of the masses, has not itself immediately rendered account of the necessity to modernise and transform the grinding equipage of Thespis to a multicylinder limousine. It began meanwhile to take into consideration " the visuality " brought bv the film in spite of the objections of the traditionalists. The technique in its triumphal march penetrates to the stage, a multitude of stage-managers is rising, which bv experimental means is aiming to build "the theatrical spectacle."