Close Up (Mar-Dec 1931)

Page scan 000353 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 #:
000353
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 335 The European Film section takes in its sweep, Sweden, Germany, "the land of fairy tales," France, and the U.S.S.R. To my mind it is in these chapters the book really comes into its own, perhaps because the author is herself European simply. There are excellent chapters on Pommer and Pabst, on Feyder and Clair; although it is impossible to agree, concerning Feyder, that his Therese Raquin was greater than Les Nouveaux Messieurs, " limited by its own superb qualities of satire." Limited to what? The intellect, surely? That's no limitation. Here, if anywhere, is a tonic film, healthy, mellow and robust; a kind of Silaenus among films, pagan and irreverent. A few more like it is exactly what we need. What's more, as subject matter it will never date, because of its laughter, its wholeness, the inevitable absurdity of statesmen. Beside it, when this epoch is over, much of the Russian output will seem cantankerous and tart — does now — a little livery. Instead of fretful, paranoiac gloating, Feyder tossed authority, to the winds with pungent and hearty gibes. What else is it fit for? It's the same thing as with Chaplin. People can't laugh any more. They want pathos, they demand to be aggrieved. An age of masochists, willing only to be abased, to concede the superiority of almost anything, particularly if it makes them uncomfortable. No wonder they get bilious and complain. What is undoubtedly the major attraction of a (let this be clear) very attractive book, is an approach both unmuddled and appreciative, to a subject about which more nonsense is spouted than almost any other. Ever so slightly pantherine is the dexterity of judgment. No hazards, no faint, hesitant theorisings. Not a bit of it. A model in compactness, in commonsense, which certainly does not exclude appreciations as sensitive as they are mature, catholic as they are orderly. K. M. Celluloid. The Film of Today. By Paul Rotha. Longman. 7s. Qd. There is in England today a group of young cineasts whose doctrine is based on the teachings of John Grierson. This doctrine is the offspring of a misunderstanding of Russian film technique on one side, and muddled thinking on the other, and now that one of Mr. Grierson's Young Gentlemen has taken to writing books, it is time to examine the mis-conception of cutting which is the foundation of his faith. The trouble seems to be that word " montage." To Mr. Rotha it means the joining together of film strips of varying lengths, and little else. To the Russians, who do not believe in metrical cutting, it means the complete synthesis of a film. The Russians looked to Hollywood, the home of film technique, for their foundations. They saw in Chaplin's method of creating a non-visual idea by the conflict of two distinct images, e.g., the shot of a collar cut into the conversation in A Woynan of Paris, the only practical way of expressing an idea on the screen. This led them to the increased use of the stationary camera and the straight cut. The time