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 #:
000243
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 country being ten or twenty years ahead in its ideas of other countries. And if Russia is going to continue as it has started, and we are going to continue as we have been going on, we will be in the same relation to modern existence as The Doomsday Book was to Queen Elizabeth. They have quaint little ways these oddities who decide that Russian films shall not under any circumstances be shown. They could not for the life of them give you a good reason or indeed any reason at all why they should not be seen. But they are emphatic. And to be emphatic is a positive condition, and a positive condition of mind, soul or spirit must be a rare treat to them. So far as one can judge that is the only cause for their behaviour. And they probably feel that anything which throws them into any sort of positive condition must be a menace, and that the positive condition itself is a sure sign of their so to speak papal infallibility in selective misjudgment. Again then, Russian films (to generalise) are the arrowpoint of cinema progress. How and why? What is a Russian film, and to go even further, what is Russia ? The two questions can be answered in one. Russia is a country inhabited by one hundred and forty-seven nationalities, quite different from each other in tradition, in convention and speech (not unlike America this), and its films are the product of these peoples banded together by the Soviet Constitution into the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. The first main reason for the greatness of their films is that they are designed to educate, to develop, and link up remote villages with the progress of the big towns. They are de 7