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 #:
000472
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 In other words they forget, or they disdain, the central reason for their work. They are so excited and so busy in 'producing' that they lose sight of what it is they are producing. The act of creation interests them far less than the act of 'putting over' that which has been created. In the judgment of the master-brain of the affair, the author is subordinate to the interpreter. The master-brain thinks first of how much he can spend on the business, not of how little. Instead of trying first to derive strength from the main theme, the master-brain tries first to give strength to the theme. The master-brain is occupied with extraneous ornament instead of being occupied with dramatic essentials. Any story will serve for a star-producer. And if by chance he gets hold of a good story he is sure somehow to ruin it by preposterous additions. I have not yet seen a first-rate story told in a first-rate style on the screen. All the new stories, contrived ad hoc, are conventional, grossly sentimental, clumsy, and fatally impaired by poverty of invention. The screen has laid hands on some of the greatest stories in the world, and has cheapened, soiled, ravaged, and poisoned them by the crudest fatuities. This charge applies less to Germany than to other countries, and it applies most of all to America ; but it applies to Germany in a very serious degree. Even Charles Chaplin shows immensely less talent for devising a tale, and the incidents of a tale, than for any of the subsidiary branches of film-work. It is no answer here to say that the big public demands 30