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 #:
000444
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 Consequently it is as a rule pathos without the dignity of tragedy, tribulation that could be quickly remedied by an 0-Cedar Mop or a slight flair for repartee, and meretricious gaiety whisked in like a panic so that the public shall retain its cheery and benevolent attitude. Good stuff this for the class that reads the penny novels. But there are other novels too, and other classes. And actually it is not good stuff even for the penny novel public. A new range of apprehensions, understandings and needs has swept cleanly across the world in the last ten years. It is dangerous and destructive to go on with the old ones that led to an incredible world butchery now only too laconically remembered. Russia is now using the cinema and using it to educate its people, to make them see sensibly, to make them understand, to refute the mediaeval falsehoods on which civilizations are built and broken. In other words, the cinema is in the hands of men intelligent enough to reahse that sane knowledge of sex, hygiene, government and religion is a foundation that does not collapse when the building is all but finished ; that myths of sorcery^ and patched up feudalism will not meet the needs of a new world. Contrariwise our cinema, almost every other cinema, is in the hands of men who do not say, but deepty and inwardly reason that it is safest to play down to mob-consciousness. At the same time they spend much of their time wondering about wars and revolutions. Whichever way you look at it, there is a deep problem and a thorny path. If the cinema is to be saved for art (and that more direct reason for art — education in its widest and best 10