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 #:
000517
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 there no other city but this ?) There, in a pension, are the Russian refugees, well to do, but mourning while one of them plays national airs at the piano. They looked like victims, but one didn't feel for them as one should have done (and as one did feel later in some of the cafe scenes). I don't know why, unless one was simply bored with the obvious, or that penned up together they had doddered into a kind of sentimental seniUty. Anjrw^ay, one watched these elderly, affluent people surreptiously wiping their eyes, with a heart of stone. Too many themes were brought in, and kept on accumulating new incidents, all of which had to be borne in mind while waiting to link them on to some climax or main incident ; so that after a time, when the main incident did not come, there was a feeling of being overburdened. It would have been a rare satisfaction to relinquish the whole load, "ah, that is what it was all leading up to," but it was not to be. Consequently, the immediate feeling when the film was over was that it was good, but. . . .something had happened, because there was a "but" and the mind was too confused to know what. Afterwards it became clear that it had merely broken down under its cumulative load ; the story had not gone with a swing or with a growing inevitability, but in undulations all good enough in themselves yet not wholly one unity. Nevertheless, Heimweh is almost, if not quite, an outstanding film. Mady Christians gave a rare performance. In the opening scenes, it is true, there was an impression that unduly restrained acting w^as not allowing her to be herself, so that a httle later, when she entered the drawing room at the pen 75