Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Record Details:

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.

■Y2 CLOSE UP film and the theatre which enthusiastic people speak of as something condemned to death will become a talkie, and besides a coloured three dimentional film. This is the question. What stage-manager will be able to exploit the dynamism of the stage, its acoustic and luminous conditions and to tie in an artistic total this synchronic and simultaneous amalgam ? The role of a stage-manager becomes very complicated. His endeavour will be the co-ordination of the composition of the structure in space and time. It is not to be feared that these technical accessories and all this refined machinery will strangle the living word in the theatre. Theatrical pieces of the future will be preferred by the quality of words and not by their quantity, for we need powerful and striking words, not verbal torrent. Visual impressions produced by a mightv theatrical technique will never eliminate the Word but they will underline its value, rejecting exaggerated loquacity. The development of the theatre of the future is in the coordination of the Word with great visuality ! If the theatre, like the film is tending to grow rich by means of perfection of technique, there is no reason for seeing in this competition with the cinema, for in that case the film serves as an accessory to the theatre. The perfected theatrical technique of Andre Pronaszko and Simon Syrkus precedes and goes beyond dramatical work. This technique has as its principle the putting of the dramatic work into competition and the opening of new ways and means to its development. Messrs. Pronaszko and Syrkus desire to give a stimulus which will enable the dramatic work to awake from its sleep, caused partly by want of " possibilities " of the traditional stage. This project of a new theatre does not lose connection with reality, as happened formerly, but it opens considerable ways and possibilities for the composition, gives famous perspectives to the realisers of future spectacles for the masses, for which it is in the first place designed. Technique considered as an inspiring idea gives the key to the dramatic authors and to the stage-managers for solving new problems of theatrical art and in this finds its end, because by itself it is unable to regain the theatre : we must have a dramatical work that will enable its whole application . Zygmunt Tonecki.