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 #:
000263
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 music, the suave dusk and an amatory continuity with ardent close-ups is enough to work the charm, the pubhc is under its spell, half drugged, entirely at rest. No wonder the film is popular. Event at its worst it is a sort of hashish ! All the same why does the casual visitor write me disparaging letters ? Because he has taken his mind to his local cinema. A great mistake. Leave your mind at home. Make that a rule. If needed it will be there, but if you take it with you you will find it cumbersome paraphernalia. You have taken your mind to honestly grapple with something that is not in the scope of mind at all, and you are misled into thinking that I have no right to say that films are the art of the future. When I say that I do not mean that Adolphe Menjou is the art of the future, talented as he may be, nor Norma Talmadge, nor Liane Haid. I mean that films, not people are the art of the future, or if you will have it, a combine of the arts of the future. You cannot dispute if you have only seen its worst or mediocre presentations. See Kopf Hoch Charley, see The student Of Prague, see Potenikin, Out Of The Mist, Chang, Prince Achmed, and then begin to judge ! To each of these you may return "Yes, HU..,'\ "Yes, but...'\ and I will say, "Yes, but,., take them as a whole. Think of what all these films, considered as different specimens of one medium, amount to in the aggregate ! Shuffle them up, make one force of them, and isn't it a mighty force ? " Think what you have. First of all pure form, every single attribute of photographic art, miracles to work in tones and tone depths, light, geometry, design, sculpture. . . .pure abstraction all of it. Then 15