Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000170 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000170
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 might serve as items in public programmes for children. Apart from these and the selection that might be made of the films already publicly exhibited, there is to hand no material wherewith to draw up programmes for children's shows. It may not unreasonably be objected that the children themselves do not want children's shows, that a cinema for juveniks equipped with no matter what enticements would be tarred for the average child with the same brush as is every institution, educational or otherwise, supposed to be adapted to its needs, and that unless they were denied admission to other cinemas children would treat the newcomer with contemptuous neglect. Some of them would. Many would not. Most parents of cinema-visiting children would rally round the experiment. Those who doubt its final capture of the children may be invited to consider the case of the child amongst his favourite books. For the relationship between child and film finds its nearest parallel in that between child and picture-book. Children's films, in nearly all their desiderata, are akin to children's books, with the difference that the film, with its freedom from the restrictions of language, is more nearly universal than the book and can incorporate, for the benefit of the rest, the originality of each race unhampered by the veil of translation. Apart from racial divergencies, films for children, like children's books, call for certain common characteristics. The child has ceased to be a born criminal, a subject for continuous repression and admonition, and is ceasing to be a toy adult, a person whose mind is a small blank sheet upon which the enterprising elder may inscribe what he will. Something of these he still is, but the something else, the 24