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 #:
000454
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 have your goodwill ; you want to see this film. Close Up, backed by a large number of producers wants you to see this film. Why then can't you see it ? Doesn't it seem rather unreasonable and far fetched ? You see your position. In between us and you Hes a most impertinent and arbi ' trary barrier that has you at its mercy on its one side and the producers at its mercy on the other. Then down with the barrier, have it down, smash it, blow it up with dynamite. It is cheating you and defrauding the producers ; it is ruinous wasteful and unscrupulous. And all the branches that constitute this faction control the film world. I am in a position to state that soon there is going to be an organised movement to turn the tables and to bring some sort of reason and order into the existing chaos, and then your support will be valuable while the sparks fly. Die Liehe Der Jeanne Ney, then, stands at this minute as an example of perfection unprotected utterly. Perhaps nobody again will see the film as I saw it in a projection-room at Neubabelsburg, set starkly on the screen unhelped by any suavity of music or surrounding. What an improvement this was ! Here was the medium straight and on its own, and all the stronger for it. It had a bite to it seen that way it could never have had with the blur and ornament of music. The story begins in the Crimea, and right at the beginning there are scenes that will make a happy hunting-ground for the censors, a scene of Russian officers and women getting 20