Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000281 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 #:
000281
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 ing. The Admirable Crichton may be sacred to you and me, but its screen alias of Male and Female has a far bigger pull with John Smith and his uncles and his aunts and his cousins the world over. The producer is not interested in literature as literature. His milieu is pictures, not words. Literary art is of value to him only in so far as it has something to offer that is adaptable to his specialized medium. If he is ready to pay ten thousand dollars for a piece of literary work for the sake of a mere idea contained in it, and, based on that idea, turns out a film that bears little or no resemblance to the original, that is his privilege. We may gnash our teeth over it, but at the same time we must be careful not to misinterpret this reaction of ours as evidence that the producer is an ignoramus. The failure of the great majority of novelists and playrights who have gone to Hollywood, to write directly for the screen, has proven a mutual disappointment. And author and producer are equally to blame — the author for failing to perceive the distinctive difference between literary and pictorial expression, and the producer for assuming that ability to produce an excellent novel or drama implies the ability also to write an ordinary scenario. And so it is that many of our contemporary literary lights, numbering among them Michael Arlen, Gilbert Parker, Basil King, Joseph Hergersheimer, Mary Rinehart, Gertrude Atherton, Fanny Hurst, Irving Cobb, Booth Tarkington, Rupert Hughes, have twinkled brilliantly for a time on the Hollywood studio lots, only to disappear more or less quickly and return gratefully to their native firmament. Each to his own trade. The cobbler to his last. Novels 37