Close-Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

Record Details:

Title:
Close-Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1933
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000136
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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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124 CLOSE UP all this on the screen, to launch a " monstrous challenge " to American society and give practical expression to this 180 per cent, advance in sound film culture. . . We parted and pursued our several wars, like ships on the ocean. . . . . . And von Sternberg filmed the piece — directly, literally — the other way rourTd, as it were, discarding everything on which we had based our conception and including in the picture everything that we had discarded. The idea of an " internal monologue " never entered von Sternberg's head. . . Von Sternberg confined his attention to -w hat actually made a straight detective story. Dreiser himself, like a grev-haired lion, fought for our so-called " distortion " of his work, and wrathfully did battle against the Paramount people, who had produced a formally and outwardly correct version of his subject. Two years later the screen witnessed O'Neill's " Strange Interlude," which, by its dual and triple reproduction of speaking voices round the silent figure of the hero, still further aggravated the ponderous clumsiness of his dramaturgical cuneiform script. A flagrant caricature of the montage possibilities of the internal monologue. The work of our collective regisseur is of a similar type. The definition and estimation of a work by means of the treatment. But, above all, with a realization of the constructively artistic and formerly fruitful role of what has here become a tedious and forced ideologically and ideological persistence. Realization not in a scheme but in the living organism of the production. This is the principal work which confronts our collective regisseur — the collective regisseur of the 3rd course of GIK. And though we shall seek the actual theme for this work in every tract of the ocean of diverse and striking thematic material around us, I believe, none the less, that the first experiment along our path w.ll be the evolution of a film on a theme that has long been awaiting treatment — the theme of the " 20th Centurv Youth " — " the vouth of the U.S.S.R." Moscow, October, 19-32.