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 #:
000178
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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166 CLOSE UP volcano, resorting, if necessary, to a tyranny of a physical nature. So passionately anxious is he to find reality in each moment of his work, and even in his life, that he will go to any extreme. His almost biological method of work is probably a hangover from his days of being a chemical student who could never stop experimenting. Wjien he, I think it was 1925, separated his work from Kuleshov, with whom for three years he had studied and developed a cinematic principle on paper and without a camera in a disused barn, (both of them living on the edge of starvation and thinking of spring when neither of them possessed an overcoat in the Moscow winter) he made a semi-scientific film Mechanics of the Brain based on Pavlov's theory of reflex. He went to a maternity hospital and asked if any woman would be willing for him to film her face during the confinement. One was only too pleased, and when he arrived, he found her with hair done to perfection and face made up, far more interested in becoming a film star than a mother. I have not seen the result, but I believe that the effects Pudovkin achieved were quite extraordinary. In his last silent picture, The Simple Story which will soon be shown in England, Pudovkin created most of the acting effects — the young son's awakening, which is one of the most beautiful moments Pudovkin has achieved, and the smiling father are the result of montage. Two other scenes; the boy stretching and smiling in the sun, and the hysterical scenes of Masha, the Red Army Commander's wife are the result of physical tyranny. Neither of the actors are professional. Pudovkin asked the boy to bend and touch his toes and remain in that position for over ten minutes; in the meantime the camera was set. " You can stretch," cried Pudovkin. The boy did it luxuriously and full of pleasure. " Shoot," shouted the regisseur, and they shot. " That's good," said Pudovkin pleased, the boy smiled and at that moment the next shot was taken. Masha, Pve forgotten her name, but she was discovered by one of the assistants, who has a quality of simplicity and sincerity and a beauty which is quite wonderful, was asked before the shooting of the hysterical scenes, on the recovery of her husband from a death like coma, not to eat for two days, and not to sleep the night before the shooting. One of the assistants kept vigilant guard ! On the morning of the shooting Pudovkin talked to her on every conceivable subject for hours until she burst into a frenzy of weeping and the shooting then began. " Laugh," he cried, " Laugh, laugh !" and she burst into hysterical laughter. I think the end justifies the means for even the means are stimulating to the imagination when it is as the dictator of so vital a regisseur striving to translate the active titanic dreams into reality. Marie Seton.