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 #:
00090
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 a matter oi fact comparison is imipossible, only that people do run the idea of comparing. The theatre is one thing, the movie another. "I like the pictures," people say, "but I like to see the real thing." Meaning the play. Well, to borrow a phrase from the back of the dictionary, chacun d son gout, only don't let us get into a metaphysical discussion' of reality. Last month I outlined the position of the film to-day from the point of achievement. This month I am dealing with lack of achievement. What hasn't been done is in the minds of the public, what hasn't been put before the public is honest facts since the year 1910, or thereabouts. Prejudice then rampant now crawls, but has life. Prejudice which then made mothers and m.agistrates quite calmly blame on the film the countless evils due to rotten education, and lack of sex instruction, comes to the surface, still alive for the miUion and oneth time, and tomorrow for the million and twoth. Be it admitted, however, films themselves have suffered and do and will from just the same cause, from false values, and lack of right education. Mothers and magistrates still point to the screen and say "Please it wasn't me. He did it !" forgetting that such values as a child may deduce are entirely values they have taught it to deduce. Mostly films are tract like in their sledge-hammering of the necessity for virtue, but childrens' books, put down in Freudian black and white are nearly always in the range of elaborate pathology. There are dozens of other prejudices, and dozens upon dozens of "hardly justified" prejudices, of not caring but 10