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 #:
000213
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 note much the same : that is the demand for, and enjoyment of, sensationaHsm, alternating with a negativism or so-called cynicism covering a strong but repressed emotional attitude. Thus we may see in the excessive demand for the Cinema, both a symptom of this prevalent attitude, and a gratification of the wishes creating that attitude : it is by investigating along these lines that we may come to understand some of the deeper significance of the problem. But before dealing wdth these more complex issues let us consider a moment the more obvious aspects. Everyone agrees on certain predominant characteristics of the Cinemaentertainment : Its overpowering appeal to the eye and correspondingty small demand upon intellectual processes : its arbitrary, and therefore false, simplification : its confusion of values ; the film knows no light and shade ; features which are striking to the eye, however superficial or trivial in content, however subsidiary to the main theme, may equal in value or even submerge the really significant aspects : its perpetual variety : and finally the illusion of timelessness due in the first place to the fact that real human beings are never present, only simulacra, and in the second place to swiftly culminating happenings without intermediate phases of slow elaboration. In the face of this we must ask, is this type of experience, with such characteristic features, suited to either the demand of the child-mind or to its harmonious development. The child as such must learn to develop beyond its purely visual pleasures — a pleasure which along with taste and touch pre 47