Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000265 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 #:
000265
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 Give me what I can sell. Right. You are right. Say to the box office you are right. They are right. Goods is goods, and if the people demand laudanum in bottles and raw spirits instead of the red wine and white wine of intellectual sustenance, by all means give them laudanum in bottles and raw, raw spirits. But do the people demand this. This is what I say, do they, do they ? How do we know what the people want, have the people really a voice in all this matter? The people, I mean not just people. How do we know what the people want until the people have seen what they may or might want. The people do not know what film art is, so how can the people demand film art ? The people sickened by the scent of laudanum, feeling numbness threaten stability and integrity say in many cases, no films. To the people, films stand in many, many instances for poison, for dope in its most pernicious essence, for aphrodisiacs that stupify and drain the senses and cripple the desires. Because certain inferior bottles have held aphrodisiacs and raw spirits, and even more pernicious dopes, are all the flasks, and jars and bottles in the world to be damned and smashed equally ? Is Egyptian porcelain that has held the heart of a Pharoah and the wine goblets of Felenia and the crystals of Venice and the gold chalices of the Grail and the flask of Chianti, straw-bound flasks of the Tuscan foot-hills to be damned and smashed before the contents are even so much as sampled ? The pity is that it is only the connoisseur and the specialists that have, at the moment, access to the thing we must now unreserverdly term film ART. It is as much a duty of the educated classes and the connoisseur, the privileged classes in all countries, to see that the great art 21