Close Up (Jul-Nov 1927)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Nov 1927
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00022
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Early Cinema, Global Cinema, and Switzerland
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:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP ing, and long experience back of it. I don't say you won't find specialists in the film industry, at least one expects to now in the face of things, but I do happen to know that any specialists there may have been have probably been living on the dole while the butcher and baker and candlestick maker solemnly were taking matters into their own hands, and making sort of town hall tableaux in a local church bazaar, borrowing sometimes London's worst and ugliest actors to draw the crowd. And, oh hell, haven't you heard enough of that wretched alms-begging attitude, 'Poor little England, how can it be expected to stand up to America where there is so much money.' What rot. One hundred pounds will make a film as noble as anything you can wish to see. Money is no excuse. Nothing is any excuse for trying to put over rotten work on the public. The public isn't a pack of fools. Narrow and illiterate very often, but there are distinct limits beyond w^hich one cannot descend, just as, there are distinct limits beyond which one cannot AScend if one is out to grab its attention. You cannot trick and cheat your way into its favour. That is what the various butchers, bakers, etc would not learn, and what one feels, more in sorrow than in anger, the industry as a whole has yet to learn before it has a dog's chance. Actually, as things are, no new country can expect to build up an industry on old lines. Mediocrit}^ has been so utterly perfected in Hollywood mediocrity even flashed across, now and then, with greatness, that it is rather silly to butt in there. Germany has its quality, so has France, Russia might have too. 10