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 #:
00028
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:
August 29, 2022
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. CLOSE UP { THE WAR FROM THREE ANGLES THE BIG PARADE. MONS. THE EMDEN. It was inevitable perhaps that the first authentic comment on the War should come from America. Not being so thoroughly involved as Europe it was possible for individual criticism to break through earlier than on this side of the Atlantic. England for instance has never had its "Enormous Room" ; it's "Three Soldiers". But then both here and in Germany, the whole nation was involved and during a grim period of years. There was not the hysterical wave of warfever, with its rush and chaos and resultant swift subsidence, that there was in the States with its months — as against years — of actual fighting. Therefore the individual — caught in it — had a chance of survival. It is hard to imagine an Englishman or a German surviving with enough strength to protest artistically afterwards. Those that came through were too bored v/ith the unending monotony or too broken with the tyranny any army must impose on the human mind, to be able to create of it literature or pictures. All the protest that one recalls, therefore, seems American. Cummings, Dos Passos, in writing. Stallings in pictures and a play. i6