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 #:
00037
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 French have not, in their entertainment, the gift of the popular, whether in the revue, the vaudeville show or the motion picture. The French need to be vigilant against two related faults : sentimentality and refinement. The French sentimentality is not moral sentimentality, as in the case of the English and the American, but aesthetic sentimentality. + It is present in almost every French film, but where it is held within the boundaries of each instance it aids rather than oppresses the film. It is sensitivity in The Sea-Shell and the Clergyman of Germaine Dulac, and in her Cmegraphic Study upon an Arabesque ; it is sensitivity bordering on collapse in En Rade; it is sensitivity avoiding collapse by larger references in Epstein ; it is a diffusive and soft sentimentality in Poirier and Gance. Leon Poirier has made beautiful documents in The Black Journey and the second part of Exotic Loves where the image is the end, but in Verdun and Jocelyn, where the image refers to its sources in national and literary experience, he offends with his superfluous stresses of sentiment, and that is sentimentality, or one form of it. Gance continually associates his image with some poetic " phrase : Violin and the lily, Napoleon and the eagle (in Napoleon), the rose of the rail " (in The Wheel). And both enjoy the surimpressed symbol : The wSpirit of France. I have said Gance was Hugo without Hugo's vision. That makes him the X A signal instance of refinement applied wrongly is Renoir's The Little Match-Girl^ where the operetta-Russian Ballet (which is really French in its mincingness) decorative sense was exercised upon a Danish folk-theme. Decorative refinement is one of the main obstacles to the creation of a French cinema comedy. 19