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 #:
000150
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 LP By RICHARD WATTS, Jr. To an American cinema season that threatened to be singularly arid and unprofitable, the European producers have come gallantly to the rescue. It is only fair to add, lest this summary sound like just another anti-Hollywood blast, that the rescue did come as something of a surprise. During the last season or two the so-called " art theaters " of New York have been showing us pompousl}' heralded examples of the European photoplay which — with the exception of Czar Ivan the Terrible — have seemed so crude and amateurish in workmanship, beside even the most routine of the local product, that the pictures made abroad had come into pretty general disrepute. Certainly, though, the Hollywood output of the last six months, despite a certain standard of technical proficiency, has been a discouraging one, even to the most generous and optimistic of observers. A frantic desire to imitate has become the one notable tendency in American film-making. A constant succession of crook pictures, nightclub melodramas, mystery dramas and romances about shopgirls who married the millionaire has been our weekly screen fare because some firm or other had once turned out a successful crook picture, nightclub melodrama, mystery drama or 12