Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000272 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 #:
000272
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 character and an English character, and not a diluted and febrile imitation of Hollywood being English, or Russian or Fiji Island-ish. Hollywood is Hollywood, and it is slick and it is straight, and it is American. Give me your English people and I will give you an English film tradition that will make the Germans and the Russians and the Americans green with envy. Well . . . perhaps not a little hyperbole, I grant you. But give us a chance anyhow. Let the people and the directors get together. The camera men and the stars. The camera man is the star and the star is the director. Or should be. But give us the English people and we will give you the English film. We want films of the people for the people, and this . . . and this . . . and this . . . BY the people. The great new Russian idea is not to make star personalities, but to let personalities make stars. God has made us, and we have made ourselves and each one of us is a " star " in embryo. Life and the film must not be separated, people and things must pass across the screen naturallv like shadows of trees on grass or passing reflections in a crowded city window. The Russian has taught us that life and art are in no way to be severed and that people to be actors must first and last be people. The great German who I quote constantly said to me " the screen cannot lie.'' But the screen in England has lied constantly and consistently about the English people, and in time foreign nations will cease to judge England by a past and vanished Trafalgar, and will expect nothing of a people who with such great wealth and with such rare and unique possibilities present so comparatively little on the screen that is really of political, sociological or artistic value. 28