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 #:
000446
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 mean much more to applauding audiences than Douglas Fairbanks in the Black Pirate or Buster Keaton in The General. The Cavell story is a different matter. Edith Cavell was everything that has been said of her, but she got herself trapped— as did thousands of others — in war. And if war is not a parlour-game people must expect to endure the consequence and incident of war. I am certain that Edith Cavell herself would have been the first to say do not make this film. She herself said, remember, patriotism is not enough. Were the story to be treated solely as a document to show the rabid filthiness and crime of war as war, and one were sure there would be no hint of an attempt to show the crime of Germany making war on England, all would be well. She was shot. It was ghastly enough and terrible enough, but if we must have wars we must have murders. It is equally terrible that there are men to-day all over the world desperately and horribly injured. One disabled ex-soldier is quite as tragic as the story of Nurse Cavell. Say all this on the screen repeatedly and you are saying truth. Say anything else and the lie will help repeat another Cavell story and aU the butchery over again. And what will happen with the Cavell story is that unless it is presented with all the paltry bigotry called patriotism, the mob will thunder it is wicked and a lie. I mean by this that the Cavell tragedy has been used and will be used again as an excuse for ugly, out-at-elbow spite (I cannot find in it the depth of hate) made doubly cheap by running alongside it a shallow glorification or hero-worship, sufficient to make the 12