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 #:
000500
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 I have seen only three, though "stills" from the others convince me of the sincerity and interest of all his work. The three films which I have seen are Joyless Street, Secrets of the Soul and Die Liehe Der Jeanne Ney. I came late to the cinema and I came because of Joyless Street. For years it never occurred to me that movies were worth consideration. I actually went to Holh^vood without the slightest idea that they made films there and was much perturbed and quite uninterested when famous stars "shot'^ scenes under my bedroom window. Enthusiasts on my return to Europe occasionally persuaded me to a cinema. I did not dishke them but felt they had no Unk with my particular development. Then one wet dismal afternoon in Switzerland I went to Joyless Street. And saw what I had looked for in vain in post-war literature, the unrelenting portrayal of w4iat w^ar does to life, of the destruction of beauty, of (as has been said) the conflict war intensifies between those primal emotions, "hunger and eroticism". It was all too right. Of Greta Garbo much has already been written in Close Up though it will be hard to forget her as a symbol of beauty in war as she stood (right at the beginning) in the queue in the drear\^ street or that other moment when the whole end of destruction was in her gesture as she stood staring by the window at the finish of the film, ^^^lether rescued or not does it matter ? People are as the butcher was, or there would not be war, would not be hardship, would not be misery. Knowing this actual contact becomes comparatively unimportant, all escape tinged with phobia. But 58