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 #:
000101
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:
July 25, 2024
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CLOSE UP mited outlook and by stunted artists themselves, that people don't like good pictures. They do, if not always for the same reasons that you or I do. The}^ don't like dishonest pictures, or pretentious, ''arty" ones. I have recently seen an audience restless before the trickeries of Gance's Napoleon when they took quietly, with appreciation, the real audacities of Dreyer in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, a film that, incidentally, has made a tremendous profit. People like good pictures, when they can get them, and it is not always the managers' fault that they can't. Mr. Ogilvie's greatest difficulty is not the public, but the man who looks after the public, the censor. This institute of inhibtion has banned La Tragedie de la Rue and Joyless Street for pubHc exhibition. The film Society gave this latter film once, but it was cut in such a way that when I saw it later in Brussels, I saw almost another film, neither version being the correct one of Pabst. The duties, again, are extremely high, and so against a man bringing in foreign films of any but the most obvious general appeal. It cost altogether €150 when Waxworks was first brought into the country, Mr. Ogilvie told me. This is a lot for a manager to risk, as Mr. Ogilvie would have to risk it. Sixty pounds, he said, w^as all very well. One could show the film for a fortnight and lose nothing, but it would need a run of a month to pay for such a duty on a film. It is not that the public do not respond (while I was there, each time, the telephone rang constantly. . . . Six seats. . . . Four seats. . .what time does the film come on. . . .) but simply that these duties are 65