Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00024
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 does not, even in this age of specialization, bar one from another art or another profession. The cult of youth has produced some interesting conditions in the French cinema. There is no differentiation here between the amateur and the professional. And this is bad for the amateur, the beginner. The group of young men which includes Auriol and Lenauer will agree that what I say about the inflation of the amateur is true, but they will not agree that they are contributing to the very condition they mock. If there is snobbism in France, and there is, thev are strengthening it by their attitude, and one of them is youth. Any number of youngsters (some of older age) put out a film deriving rudimentarily from Rien que les Heures (without full awareness of the principle) or Berlin and enter the ranks of the metteiirs en scene, with the footnote : forgive the transgressions, they are young and they had no money. To produce a film without money always excites the professional (or better commercial) world, but it should mean nothing to the beginner — that's just how he should begin, and moreover, why should his first work be made public? In America we distinguish between the amateur and the professional, and that is the amateur's salvation. It is a part of the discipline of any artist to "be rejected " or to be ignored — that he may learn how really insignificant his infant labors are. If youth is not favoured in the large French companies, its favor in the specialized halls is certainly less creditable. If the young Frenchman really cares about the French film, he will not heed the cry of defeat (which is really a selfinflation) but w411 examine the French film to learn the French idiom, which must be his. That the American film, by its 14