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 #:
000118
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 on, in a fleecy peplum if you want but somehow just be the thing, do the thing with no exaggeration of sentiment such as w^e w^ere treated to by Diotirna in that nightmare (to me) Heilegeberge (Wrath Of The Gods). Mountains are classic, the sea, sand, and the really charming grace and agility of Tom Jones when he leaps on a crowded City bus. Haven't you yourself noticed it ? Untrained yet unsullied movement should merge with professional power and tact. The screen is the medium par excellence of movement — of trees, of water, of people, of bird wings. Flowers open by magic and magic spreads cloud forms, all in themselves "classic". Though, on the other hand, the most ornate back parlour crowded with gimcracks can represent "restraint" if the mind presenting it has its own intense restrained unit of idea. Take Greed as an example of the classic mind al work upon ornate exaggeration of detail in a sordid modern tenement atmosphere. Here is m}^ point and my contradiction ; the over elaborate tenement detail of Greed struck a far more classic note than those sentimental German slow-ups of Diotima doing barefoot dancing on an uncomfortable slab of sea rock. The classic then, coming down to dots, is a point of view and "restraint" is a classic virtue which means simply tact and intuition and a sense of the rightness and the fitness of things in their interrelation. Diotima dancing on the mountains was so simply silly. With all its over elaborate detail, the dramatization of the impulse that led an illiterate, self-educated quack dentist to die in a desert with vultures hovering over his goldladen, dying mule was Aescuylean. It is obvious that cer 38