Close Up (Jan-Jun 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00045
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:
August 28, 2022
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CLOSE UP ingly unintelligible portrayal of pseudo-emotion and pseudobehavior which is not characteristic of the human race except in so far as the race increasingly imitates the emotions and behaviour of the robots of the screen, a new race, manufactured by the Hollywood camera, which not only misrepresents humanity in general, and the American people in particular, but has a perceptible influence in perverting both. The large trouble with the Jannings films seems to be that this human acting is distorted by the general artificiality and inhumanity of the whole story and theme. The strain to fit a realistic actor into a story which is supposed to be realistic but essentially is not distorts the actor and points up what is tawdry in the whole. At the Little Theater in Washington, which is specializing in revivals and what the Moving Picture Guild thinks is the best of the new work, I saw also Wild Love, said to represent actual life among mountain folk in the lower Alleghenies and to have been acted entirely by untrained mountain people. I doubt it. I have directed stark amateurs and know something of what they will do and won't do. The point is unimportant, except that the salient note of all the movies is the false. I am not arguing for the realistic to the exclusion of the artificial. In fact I am not sure that this sort of authenticity, which is important in science, if science is important, has anything to do with art. But I detest the artificial that pretends to be real as much as the artificial that is spoiled by intrusions of reality and common sense. Melodrama is good, but not melodrama presented as real life. Contrast 29