Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Page scan 000341 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 #:
000341
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 323 with the opera and finishing with the revue and operetta, beating the record of the worst theatrical routine. One must not forget, however, that the silent film, before having attained perfection, started with mobile kitsch-like photographs, and hence Balazs's conviction that in the future the sound film will refine our ear, giving to it as many sensations as the silent film has given to our eye. By an analogy with the culture of the eye, created by the silent film, Balazs sees the development of the sound film on a parallel road, i.e., on a road of creation of the culture of the ear. While our optical sensations had attained their summit, we resented a hunger for additional sensations of the ear. Not so very long ago an orchestra had to perform the sound score in the musical illustrations " strictly corresponding to the picture," i.e., imitating the singing of nightingales or other birds in a scene of love, backing up war scenes by the imitation of shots and the rattle of machine guns. The role of the sound film must not, however, be confined to completing the wants of the silent film. In our postulate with regard to the tone film we claim the creation of a new and individual art. The sonore film has " acoustic prospects," the significance and the importance of which we are not in a position to point out at present. Balazs analysing the "heard world " that surrounds us sets forth certain ideas, which in spite of their invention, are little persuasive. There is no doubt about it that in the development of the tone film a great role will be played by the coloured film and as correctly maintained by Balazs, a film of this kind will have to overcome the co-called montage of colours, i.e., to consider beside the usual montage, the mutual relation of colours, their interference and their optical reaction. The same problem is complicated and becomes more difficult for solution in the threedimensional film, as well as the stereoscopic and plastic ones. The Film in the theatre. The problem of adopting the film on a theatrical stage belongs, according to Balazs, to the problems of montage. The film in the theatre — we understand it as a part " inlaid " in the theatrical show, may be included and submitted to the general mise-en-scene, and this as a strictly independent whole, having onlv these or other contiguous points with the arrangement of a given scene or of a series of scenes. These combinations of the theatre with the film irritate very much the " aesthetisizing " theatrologues who see in this fact a lesion of the " pureness " of theatrical art, forgetting as they do, that the theatre has always been a conglomerate of spiritual elements and of those pertaining to a spectacle; a place of spiritual and also of optical shaping. On the other hand it is wrong to think that by adapting a film to the theatre, will be removed the traditional and conventional contradiction on the stage between the mobile play and the static decor.