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 #:
00088
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 People are still apt to sneer when you talk of films being art. Even picture-goers. Movies are not the Salon or the Royal Academy, they are not the Louvre or the British Museum, they are not Dostoieffsky or Anatole France or Rudyard Kipling, they are not Beethoven or Debussy. They are not linked up. Nobody has related them to these people, and the catch is nobody can ! They aren't related to these people and the things they stand for. The movie is the new thing, the movie goes back to no tradition. And millions will deplore it. MiUions will sa.y ah, yes, you cannot expect a great art with no background, nothing behind it. But putting thousands against millions (which in a way proves the case for movies) people will say with me, the great and glorious thing about the movie is just that — just its utter newness. It has, it is true, its conventions, but they are as tiny runnels to the abysmal channels carved bj^ tradition in other arts out of which one must clim.b before seeing anything as anything is. The glorious strength of the movies is just that they have no past, no historj^ This aimless and senile clinging to the old, to the old, to the old, gives one at length black phobia. The newest artist will gloat and gloat because of this medium. Nightingales and roses have been in poetry until they are almost, if not completely destroyed for us. There is a point. The artist, who leaps on ahead pointing out beauty or truth must leap on ahead. He has to dance at the head of the procession, saying look look. If he can only point at the same thing always he becomes wearisome, no longer a teacher. He 8