Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

Page scan 000343 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1933
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000343
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 319 work, with a correlating of poetic influences — the Blake designs in the fire, the Pascin, Giotto, Dore, and Joseph SteUa treatment, shows us wherein slow motion, distortion, the sliding track, can be more legitimate than the face to face stage-set. Personality coalescing with a piece of stone, the obliterating cloud of doves, " the silver cord " and other historic colour, are incontrovertibly conclusive for the art of the film. An illusion of quiescence of which one is scarcely conscious should be mentioned — that of not looking at just another motion-picture-house Derby dash for the post. (Sensation of this kind, imparted by tested sensibility, could be of interest to those who have been studying the effect of motionpictures on the sleep of children.) This principle, of control contributing to the impression obliquely, again prevails in the chanted lines by Lot's wife, against the body of the orchestra — somewhat as the recorded nightingale song is drowned by the orchestra in Respighi's The Pines of Rome. And the beauty which is on the head of the fat valley shall be a fading flower And the stream thereof shall be turned to pitch. From generation to generation it shall lie waste ; none shall pass through it forever and ever. And he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness. The mirth of the tabret eeaseth. The song of them that rejoice endeth. The joy of the harp eeaseth. (Isaiah). Speech would be meaningless by comparison with the harrowing flute for the writhing combatants, and the harp melody for the angel ; the music is not the national anthem nor a passing band ; it teUs the story. As you know better than anyone else does, how to open your combination safe, a civilization that has reached an extreme of culture, is going to have pleasure, will have it and is meting out justice to any man that interferes. But the pleasure is not joy, it is strangling horror — the serpent that thrusts forward rigid — and does not know it ever was anything else. We see luxury extinguished and hauteur collapse — with gaiety waning into anguish, fire, ashes, dust. Marianne Moore. THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY. For October, 1933, The International Review of Educational Cinematography contains : Draft Convention for facilitating the International Circulation of films of an Educational Character ; and J. Cohen — The Psychology of the Public. W. Gunther — The Organisation of the Rural Sound Film. G. Rossi — Publicity in the Service of Cinematography, The " National Film Library." S. Milano — Points in Education by the Cinema.