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 #:
00025
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 person out of an office, simple and bovine and very much in love. A dreadful shilling-shocker story. The young wife falls for the slick young man. Things are found out, there is a grand scene (how grand ! ) and she leaves. The slick young man turns her down. She jumps into the river. The husband is seen following in wake of feet that too obviously mince ! The slick young man is seen standing about in the empty room where the wife had sheltered. An old woman sweeps the floors, ignoring him, sweeps round where he is standing. Presently he goes quite simply out. The old woman turns, goes on sweeping. That is all. But except for some wretched and unnecessary moments where the usual child is lugged in as the usual mediator, and hugged in the usual way by the usual bereaved father, there was a marvellous power to the story^ Veidt as the lover, oddly sinister, doing hardly anything. The young wife, very aware, currents beating in the air. Something in the way they stood in rooms, measuring one another, the suggestion of interplay of wills, of muffled nuances. A sense of fatality all the time, Nju should not have made that chilly plunge. She should have been left, perhaps walking in a wet street with leaves, facing her problem. It would have given more intensity to the moment when Veidt stood in the empty room. It is always so much more poignant that things are going on, than that they have ended. In many ways, perhaps this is the best film that has yet been done. It was chronicle not fiction. The child, as I have said, was a mistake, the only stunted note of pathos. For the rest, the story was told without blur or sentiment 13