Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Page scan 000336 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 #:
000336
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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REFLECTIONS Director Benito Perojo, after a year's sojourn in Hollywood, summed up his observations with the statement that both European and American films would be bettered if each country's product were to adopt the distinctive merits of the other. " I firmly believe," he elaborated, " that a type of film drama which combines the best qualities of both would be greater than either type is now. A strong story, such as Europeans demand, dramatised to the quick tempo that makes American pictures so popular, might sweep anv audience off its feet." The super-film. Eugenic offspring of Europe and America. Truly, an engaging prospect; and withal so easy of attainment. Indeed, so easy, so simple, so obvious, that one is prompted to ask why somebody— Sr. Perojo himself, for instance — does not go blithely ahead and do something about it. However, the humour of this recipe for a superior breed of cinema lies not so much in the naive seriousness of its offering as in the fact that it has been doing active service for the past quarter of a century. The cinema has grown up on it; has taken its character from it. If no audience has yet been swept off its feet by a conjugation of European strong story and American pep, it is onlv because cinema audiences are consistently steady on their feet. Films are already as super as international adaptations and combinations can make them. That Hollywood concededly dominates the cinema world finds explanation in its superior acquisitiveness and adaptiveness ; its superior readiness to adopt the ideas, the talents, the inventions of others and combine them smoothly with its own. It has made itself cosmopolitan. All things to all men. Its films carry with them the influence of the numerous foreign elements that have contributed to its development and success. Without in the least affecting its high self-esteem, it frankly admits its indebtedness to Europe. In the free-for-all international game of give and take, it has taken more of art and craft from across the water than all the other nations together have taken from it. American films indeed owe much to Europe. The very art of cinematography had its beginning in France. It is from there that Hollywood derived its elementary cinema technique — its double exposures, its fades, its dissolves, its overlaps. The first American trick movies were patterned after Melies' films of magic from the Theatre Robert Houdin in Paris. It was Pathe Freres who showed Hollywood how to make comedies. Their Max Linder was a revelation. The quick tempo which impresses the European observer as characteristic of Hollywood films is but a persistent remnant of America's Gallic inheritance. Those early French divertissements quite took one's breath 318