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 #:
000208
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 what is about to happen. He lures her to a mirror. It is not he but his missing shadow that has done this. She stares straight into nothingness. There is the dramatic pause, the ten seconds that might be ten minutes, the ten minutes that might be ten years and the lady is tying like some dramatic beautiful Niobe (fainting ? dead ?) marble, sculptured on the floor. The beauty of that scene is one that must always remain, that must always come back, it seems now, with wind and wind-swept branches. The screen has purified and ideaUzed, is a medium for purity and idealization. No one could remain unmoved before the sheer technical beauty of that interior. There are volumes of de Regnieresque subtleties in it. This on the screen. There is the intolerable beauty of the Erlkonig come (for all its apparent unrelation) true. There are the things we can't say or paint at the sight of windows half-opened at dawn, of windows half-closed in moonlight. There is the spirit of the garden, the spirit of the water, the lake, the sea, the wind, the ghost itself of all our lives come visually before us. (Du meine Herzen, du mein Riike sings the violin now and we can't for the life of us notice that it is out of key with the piano.) There is beauty and unfulfillment and the struggle of the spirit and the body and the spirit become body and the body become spirit and the constant strife between Lucifer and the angel Michael. Michael stands before us and Lucifer. This time there is no mistaking. The spectre is an evil thing now, wishing to snatch, we see it, the living spark of divinity from the man become shadow. Baldwin has flung himself and his secret 42