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 #:
000201
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 stead to that other httle place, it's better ventilated, across the way. And so on. This storm that doesn't break. I have no reaction to anything. ... O that's what the httle man is after. For I see now. There is a rhythm within the rhythm, there is a story within the story. The little man (it is curiously he whom I personally met before in Joyless Street, disguised now out of recognition) beckons at the top of a sandy hill. The little tree twists and bends and makes all the frantic gestures of the httle tree at the cross-roads under which Faust conjured devils. That's it precisely. This has something behind it, in it, through it. That little man means more than that. He isn't an absurd httle obvious Punchinello. He is a symbol, an asterisk, an enigma. Spell the thing backwards, he seems to be saying, spell it right side to or back side to or front or behind and you'll see. . . his httle leer means something. The horses filing again, in obvious procession, mean something. They are going to spell something, make a mystic symbol across short grass, some double twist and knot and the world will go to bits. . . something is going to happen. I have forgotten the paper bags. The music does fit in. I have forgotten the hit and rise and hit and fall of the violin that doesn't in the least know that the piano is existing. That's it exactly. The piano and the viohn hve in separate elements, so this and this. The little obvious Itahan Punchinello doesn't in the least mind being jeered at. He wants to be jeered at. He has opened doors to the uninitiate. They don't know that that umbrella tucked so ridiculously 35