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 #:
00023
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:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP only the Soviet administration has clapped a dog-collar on its chances, and tagged it 'Slave to Soviet approval'. The point is HAS England a quality ? I am rather afraid the English thing is barren, mind and super-mind and the dimensions (the only things which make for greatness) being so taboo. Oh, it's a mess. And yet one so sincerely wishes them well, but there just doesn't seem anything to say. Making their films compulsory would be alright if they had something to show for them, but unless they scour and ransack and snap right up in every branch, it will mean only a needless loss for theatres that after all, are usually sufficently discerning to choose what they feel will bring in money. Anyhow, va bene. H« * * Laurels go to Germany. I like the German system quite frequently. I like the women it finds, usually to pass on to an inglorious fame at Hollywood, Greta Garbo, snow and ice and lovely clarity in Joyless Street, Camilla Horn, of Faust, white and terribly young, one felt in spite of everything, quite beyond the medaeval savagery piled with Germanic care of detail upon her, somehow by her loveliness, immune from it. Then Brigette Helm of Metropolis, again so slender and young, so DIFFERENT. And what a tour de force her ecstatic robot life ! And then back to Nju. The mothlike swiftness and slumberous slowness of Elisabeth Bergner. It is this, the finding out of new young people, someone different that gives freshness here. The anti-foreign movement in Hollywood