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 #:
00089
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 just cannot go on much longer saying "ah Spring 1" and ''ah Nightingales ! " or literature will lose its meaning. The startled author of todaj^ writes poems to squeaking shoes and jampots, and that is getting beauty upside down. And meanwhile the procession, the mass, is being kept waiting, rather between two stools ; neither content with roses and Spring, nor mechanised. And indeed, this is the time for films to begin to mean somiething. Titles like Hearts IN BONDAGE, SAINTS AND SABLES, LYING WIVES are beginning to have the same effect on the procession, the miass, as its nightingales and roses. It is not the least good pretending am/ longer that the film is a thing one does not go to. That it has been and is a place for young people to suck sweets and hold hands in is distinctly to its credit. A cinema audience has a kind of obliteration of individuality, a kind of freedom that you never find in the theatre. And it is far more commendable to be negligent or amorous in front of a bad film than prinked and starched in front of a bad play. As a matter of fact the very people who say "Cinemas ?. . . Oh, how Could you !" one has seen in shoals guffawing and gurgling over plays that any movie audience would feel insulted to have to look at. And if it's Billingsgate bed-rock argument, there is at least something straight about the droop of heads on shoulders you find in cinemas that puts to shame the carniverous expression of a thea.tre audience out for "smut". And the worst movie is seldom as indecent as a play, except Xell Gwynn and one or two others whose names we will reserve for future use. 9