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 #:
000512
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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 Played in silence the almost cubistic pattern of short, vivid moments would have been realty powerful. Briefly the story is of a man and his wife, and the housing problem of modern Russia. The two live, as has been indi* cated, in a tenement room. The husband seems a cheery^ animalistic young man, stretching and smiling beneath the bedclothes. His wife is young too, but less cheery. Indeed you observe instantly a curious sulkiness in her ; that kind of introspective brooding that can permeate a whole house. She prepares breakfast desultorily and with an air that suggests repudiation of her surrounding circumstance. The slightly bedraggled, ever so slightly slatternly appearance she presents in some wa}^ gives stress to her beauty. You notice she is beautiful, then that beauty is marred in her by something unbalanced or unadjusted ; by some dissatisfaction that is deeper and more dangerous than circumstances seem to call for. The feeling is that through ennui she would be deliberately capable of anything, but at the same tim^e not through strength but w^eakness of character. Later the husband brings back his friend. He has nowhere to stay, and the husband offers him the sofa in the corner of the room as a bed. On the morning following the new young man is up early and preparing breakfast. There is elaboration and courtesy in his attitude which tells its tale to the wife. She watches him, half sulky, half amused. She has acquired over-night a hard, wariness of expression, something furtive and covert and false. So v»'hen the husband goes away to work a few days, it is inevitable, that under the pres 70