Close Up (Jul-Nov 1927)

Page scan 00044 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Nov 1927
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00044
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP shines like an enchanter's crown. We know nothing can happen to her, 3^et do we ? Things happen, we ourselves have known them to happen.., one bj^ one, our audience (already meagre) has risen, has blatantly stamped downstairs. I hear words, whispers, English. "A thing like this filthy no one but a foreigner would dare present it." La Petite Rue Sans Joie was a real, little street. It was a little war-street, a little, post-war street, therefore our little picture palace in our comparatively* broad-minded Lake Geneva town, is emptj'. People won't, they dare not face realitj^ . And beauty, among other things, is reality, and beaut}' once in so many hundred years, raises a wan head, suddenb/ decides to avenge itself for all the slights that it has negligently accepted, sometimes through weariness, sometimes through sheer omnipotence, sometimes through cjmicism or through boredom. Simonetta, the famous Medician Venus (though I don't care for her), one and one and one, all stand a.s vritnesses that once in so often, beauty herself, Helen above Troy, rises triumphant and denounces the world for a season and then retires, spins a little web of illusion and shuffles off to forget men and their stale formulas of existence. Well beauty has been slurred over and laughed at and forgotten. But Helen of Troy didn't always sta}^ at home with ]\Ienelaus. Beautj' has been recognised and for that reason (as the world will not face realitj' and the ogre, the Censor, this Polyphemus knows well enough that beauty is a danger), ]\Iiss Garbo has been trained, and that with astonishing efficiencj^ to sway fon.vard and backward in long skirts with pseudo-Lillian Gish affectation, to pose with 32