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 #:
000502
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 is war as Die Liebe Der Jeanne Ney records the awkwardness and cruelty of changing, not yet adapted civihzations. Not banners and glory and spiritual rebirth as old ladies and newspapers and the leaders of nations preached in 1914. But death and the loosening of barriers and the shattering of decent impulse. First one gate goes, then another, with intellect and beauty, as always, the first sacrifice. The old scholar, the children, the young beautiful girl. Or the two lovers in Jeanne Ney, The right to think, to individual judgment, even the right to sympathy. No book has put down the reaction of defeat on conquerors and defeated alike as Joyless Street has done. For this reason no doubt it was censored or forbidden or mercilessly cut in every country where it was shown or attempted to be shown. And no book (except H. D. in her short story Murex) has so caught the sense of beauty broken by war. It is the thought and the feeling that line gesture that interest Mr Pabst. And he has what few have, a consciousness of Europe. He sees psychologically and because of this, because in a flash he knows the sub-conscious impulse or hunger that prompted an apparently trivial action, his intense realism becomes through its truth, poetry. He himself said once in conversation. "What need is there for romantic treatment ? Real life is too romantic and too ghostly." And his drab rooms and their inhabitants, so cruel or bUndly brave, so infinitely of life with all the problems of modern Europe surging about their hands or faces, become not only this actual world but abstractions of reality, like the myths men 60