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 #:
000501
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 beyond Greta Garbo, the other types were so perfect. The young selfish man, loosed of restraint because battle had wiped away the reward of thrift or decency, the little South American miUionaire causing misery yet with such kindly instincts beneath his thoughtlessness and vulgarity, the completely amoral "toughness" of the woman who kept the house, and more than any of them the girl who murdered for her lover with the whole history of an oppression (race, person or idea) in her eyes, as she seemed to go slowly mad with realization of horror yet never to lose consciousness, and against this the scholarly old man quite unable to cope with modern hfe, all these were to the last gesture, right. Yet I read a short time ago in an American paper that Joyless Street was distorted and untrue. And that will be I fear, the immediate criticism of Pabst's pictures. Because average people, average critics, dare not face the truth in his films. (Just as at the showing of the EngUsh official war film, "The Battle of Arras" the comment across the cinema was, "they ought not to show the corpses and the wounded !" People love cheering the men trickhng fon,vard against shells but they obliterate without sense of wrong doing what waste and suffering a battle must entail.) For myself I could only say after seeing Die Liehe der Jeanne Ney in the Xeubabelsburg projection room, "it is too true." For actual threads of thought appear in front of one, actual hfe, actual pain, actual moments of beauty, passed through a mind that is as the machine that records heart beats or the sensations of a leaf. So Joyless Street recorded the whirlpool of destruction that 59