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 #:
00039
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP persistent admirers of the Swedish film, the only fully realized passionate pictures. Here I think French critical rationality recognizes the level of tragic experience at which the Swedes have conceived their films. I do not like the way in which Sunrise was received by the French multitudes, but I must admit that the level at which it was conceived, sustained though it was throughout the enfoldment of the narrative, was a level at which it might just as easily have been rejected. For the material may have attained to the tragic, in the German conception it reached only pathos, and pathos is not far from sentimentality, emotional sentimentality. (I say all this despite my admiration of the film and its director.) The French reject emotional sentimentality, but they accept decorative sentimentality. There have been a few French instances of approximative tragedy in the cinema, and these few instances indicate a milieu which the French have not nearly begun to exploit. I refer at this moment to the domestic tragedy, which provides immediate activity for all the French qualities of provincialism, limited locale, pictorial-mind. The film that first comes to my mind is Poil de Carotte of Julien Duvivier (with continuity, I am advised, bv Jacques Feyder). The film was poignant and convincing and in every particular French. Therese Raquin belongs to the French acceptation, despite the pronounced German qualities of the exterior lighting and the acting of the tw-o male players. (Feyder, a Belgian, is assimilative.) The French, if they but knew, would do the domestic film. Dulac gave us Mme, Beudet, sensitive in its irony carried pictorially. Nine years ago Albert Dieudonne made Une Vie sans Joie (called Backbiters in England) and 21