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 #:
00053
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 as in Moana, should achieve more balanced effects and a more finished work ? The great achievement consists, I think, in the exact choice of those incidents likely to be imprinted on the memory, retaining pictures which, if the voyage had not been filmed, would have remained in the mind, and instead of embellishing these scenes, simplifying them in the same way as the mind would have done. Too much complaisance, no doubt. Their camera might have recorded many tragic and bitter things ; when one has read Gide's Voyage to the Congo, one remembers much that one is sorry not to have seen on the screen ; too much softening down, a too facile pleasure, but the public will not be able to complain. Translated by K. Macpherson. ANIMALS ON THE FILMS How much more could be done with animals on the screen than is done, and how much better what is done could be achieved ! Nearly always their best qualities are entirely ignored, and what bad qualities they could (and nearly always 4^