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 #:
000216
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 disintegration which must result from the failure of the pleasure-impulse to reach to, and co-operate with, the level of development attained by the rest of the personality — that "split" which is so marked a feature of the neurotic. By an emotional expenditure of an infantile nature only (that is, narcissistic em.otion unrelated to external reahty and very easily obtained) the emotional life remains undeveloped : inadequate and extravagant at one and the same time. It will, perhaps, appear starthng to class together those films which are true to human and scientific reality and the crudely false melodrama or romance. Undoubted^ there is a world of difference as regards the consciously-felt effects, but it is possible for the same unconscious effects to be produced in both cases since the mechanism at work is identical. In the film of the Scott Expedition, than which nothing could be more beautiful and more moving as far as the pictures themselves are concerned all the elements of magic achievement, of simpHfication, of rapid solution are present just as in other films. And this criticism holds good, though to a far less degree, in nature films, geographical films, and films illustrating mechanical processes. A small investigation recently carried out among school children of different types, and of ages varying from eight to twelve, revealed interestingly the child's capacity for distortion : seventy per cent of the children believed that such processes as the development of the chick from the egg, of the fish from the spawn, of the pearl within the oyster, of nest-building and so forth, took just the time which elapsed in the showing of the films, even 50