Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000270 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 #:
000270
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 The great horses rush forward. The crowds break before them. Mother " who has innocently given information concerning her own son (in this the unsuccessful pre-war abortive revolution) is left standing alone, clasping the discarded banner of her people . . . well that is all. The horses rush on across the iron bridge, and mother is left lying in the mud, clasping her riddled banner. Is this a red flag in the sense of murder and outrage and insane threats of an illiterate gutter mob? That is W'hat red " stands for to so many, many intelligent and educated people. The red flag of mother " as she lies, a peasant woman, trampled to unsightly death at the frigid command of an aristocratic cavalry officer, is as red as any Flander's poppy. It is only one of the most crass illiteracy who could face the beauty of mother " and remain untouched and unredeemed. So with Ten Days, so again with The End of Saint Petersburg, The teaching is a teaching of brotherhood, of equality in its most sane and stable form. We are hungry. You are not hungry. We are starving, and the baby in my arms is not yet quite dead. Well . . . w^e know all that. But do we know all that ? Do w^e really know until we have seen the Russian film as presented by the great Moscow art people, not the insane outpourings of an insane group-mind, nor the saccherine washed-out and sugared over productions of a commercially proficient colony, I do not mean, by that last diatribe, altogether against Hollyw^ood. I mean yes and yes and yes, and no and no and no. Hollywood with reservations is all right (up to a point) for America, for up to a point it is America, slick, quick, superficial and stylish, and oh, so, so amusing. Yes, I love Laura la Plante with her 26