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 #:
000217
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 though each step in the process was elaborated. And this is inevitable since the film, operating in a mechanical universe, fills the gaps, rounds all corners, and presents persons and events in the neatest way, hke so many brown paper parcels : as result, there is lack of emotional contact both in the production and the spectator. Closely related to the above is another aspect of the film which has much significance for the deeper human impulses, namely its relation to time. Research into the unconscious of man has revealed that the idea of time (and its twin-companion death) is among the most deeply-repressed material of the mind, and it is only by the process of becoming adult that a reahzation and acceptance of time becomes possible. If from a very early stage the child is strengthened in his repression so much the more difficult for him is recognition of reahty. Bearing upon another of the miost powerful impulses is that character of the film, already referred to, which demands from the spectator an almost exclusive visual attention. The powerful role played by curiosity in the early fife of the child, developed and gratified by seeing and looking, is maintained by means of the films' dominant appeal, and in thus obtaining and continuing his gratification he is assisted in remaining at the infantile curiosity-level. In the light of such effects, conscious and unconscious, (and I have here space to touch upon a few only) produced by the fihn it is surely worth while to consider whether, and to what degree, we are prepared to make it a part of our educational system. The adult, educated or ignorant, in virtue of being 51