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 #:
000495
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 and leave it to others to like it or not. For if they don't like it, they won't have it. That's the trouble. They will take it, and hack it about. And it is not only the small towns. The makers of billiard tables are now upset because biUiard tables in films are usually shown in haunts of the underworld. They complain of the bad effects on billiard saloons, on the sale of tables. ... So you must remember everybody's susceptibihties. Every small town's, every watch-committee's. You must take into account everybody who uses his position in one field to have a voice in another. Then, when you have considered how not to offend them, you must study how to please them. After that, you may make your film. If you can. But how can you ? A good one, I mean ? There is no inducement to the artist : there is every deterrent from the making of good films. A director ought to be able to copyright his work. Then we should know w^hat we were getting. We don't, now. Libraries ban a book they consider "unsuitable". What they do not do is to get the book, rip out what they don't hke and then sell the version as the complete book. They don't pubUsh an expurgated Ulysses as the real thing, they don't "clarify" Rustic Elegies or take Tess and cut out Angel Clare and Alec D'Urberville. PubHshers don't do this, but film-pubUshers do. We have, when we read a book, a chance to judge the author : we can't judge a director by the film we see, because we are only seeing bits of a film. And not bits he has chosen, either. Von Stroheim's Wedding March is being cut by von Stemberg, just as his Greed was done by someone else. A director can 53