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 #:
000219
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:
November 07, 2023
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP 207 book the poetry-making has not always been adequate to the emotion (by a poet, but not especially by O.B.). It is the smaller-sized, the more rarified sensations which have more successfully become words, or perhaps one should say " become through words." But these more explicit poems are an insurance that the time, elsewhere, is not wasted. Not knowing, therefore, which is echt Blakeston, these or those, there is excuse for the epithet " elusive." Not that either manifestation is necessarily pseudo-Blakeston — but there are directions one takes later which reveal what previous roads have been main or bye. Nor would this book be all we expected without the signature of fun, of turning back and smiling. Heart Blood that you may put in a small glass with smoky lettering on the pantry shelf I would let flow the hair of the Night to gently tickle your skin Light will return and place a shoe and stocking on my foot Smiles which retreat and throw up a protective smoke-screen for sensitiveness. Without extra charge you may get a book unusually produced by Jones, and illustrations by Len Lye which make protozoic fun, or are the Micky cartoons of the cock-eyed bacteriological world. On the cover a subliminal or larval cockolorum lets out four several doodle-do's, and you may care for the centipede on page 18 presenting laurel wreath to exploding star. R. B. Filmbiicher fur alle edited by Kraszna-Krausz 4. " Filmtricks und Trickfilme " von A. Stiiler Verlag von Wilhelm Knapp, Halle (Saale). RM 3.20 Trickfilms have been dealt with in a chapter of one of the previous numbers of the " Filmbiicher fiir alle " ; now a special small volume has been written on that subject, going into further details. But, according to the aim of these series, it is limited to the methods which can be applied by the amateur using a simple camera and primitive accessory equipment of his own making. You will find in it instructions for the different possibilities of making titles and subtitles, growing, jumping, creeping titles, moving designs, fading, shadows, etc., etc. As usual the text is supported by examples and illustrated by a rich number of designs and photograph's. P.S. — After these lines had been written I had another look at the booklet, just before I wanted to put it back into the book-shelf. And among the " examples which support the text " I found one that I had not perceived at first sight. The discovery does not alter my opinion about the book concerning thei film-tricks, of course, but I should like to give a verbal translation of the passage, for it represents a rather good example for the trend, even of technical books, in latest Germany (the volume was published in Mid-March) : Page 64. "... Now another and last example for forming a design in sections. It refers to an amateur-documentary film Mutilated Germany,