Maybe I just don’t get a lot of the theoretical stuff in this book, but I didn’t find it interesting at all. The writers of Close Up include a novelist and poet, among others, so the writing’s very different from something you’d normally find in a film theory anthology. Given that it’s from the late 1920s/early 1930s, the writing’s incredibly dry and dense, though the subject is interesting (film as an art form).

If you’ve got time to read and re-read this, you might be able to pull something good out of its pages, but if you’re just planning to gloss over a few essays for a class you’ll probably find yourself scratching your head afterwards.