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 #:
000498
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP G. W. PABST A SURVEY What intelligent reader would buy books haphazardly because of the way they were piled in a window or because cf the wrapper or the title ? The book buyer knows his pubhshers, that a volume bearing such and such an imprint will probably interest him or that this other will be no doubt too crudely written for his taste ; he knows his authors and will probably leave an order that every work issued by the few of his selection shall be posted to him on the day of pubhcation. Of course there are thousands who never buy books at all just as there arr thousands who never enter a cinema and there are plenty who buy without discrimination but it is always the intelligent minorit}' who make or discard an author just as it will be the intelligent minority who will eventually make or discard films. The ultimate value of a film depends upon its director. He is to it what an author is to a book. Actors are only the characters. The\^ may be good or bad according to a director's capacity just as the heroine may be the wooden figure of a newspaper serial or the sensitive Miriam of a Dorothy Richardson novel. Over and over again the inexperienced will rush to see actors they have admired in a film, only to find 56