Close-Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close-Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00016
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP and alone. We have helped people to realise how much is being done, has been done, and can be done to give them films which are a true contribution to the progress not only of art or education, but of the world itself. And this will seem a far fetched statement only to those who pick up Close Up for the first time to read these words. "Old stagers" — they soon becom.e that in this world of dizzj' movement — will know what I mean, and know too how much the screen has accomplished, in sociology (take Mother or Bed and Sofa) in education (take particularly specialised films for students of medicine, surgery, physiology, etc., and in a broader sense, Moana, Grass, Mt Everest, etc) in art (take Jeanne Xey, La Tragedie, Silhne — a dozen others) in historj' (Potemkin, The End of St. Petershiirg, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc — though I myself reject it firmly — ) in science, enlightenment, amusement, poetr}/, design, refuge and delight. Naturally one does not categorise except as illustration. Almost any one of the films I quote is each and every of the random classes chosen. Mother, for instance, (the Russian Mother naturalh'. I have a sneaking respect for Belle Bennett, but not for her film of the same name) is certainly sociological, educative, art, science, enlightenment, amusement, poetry, design, refuge and delight. And in the long run any progress is world progress, so don't let us pick a quarrel over that. The first natural prejudice that had to be overcome, or rather, the first impression of the public was that a journal devoted only to film art w^ould be in the main limiting, and even a little bit pernicious, in that it would be getting away 6