Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000327 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 #:
000327
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 technique. His facility for choosing always an angle for his camera which is dynamic and poignant remains a lasting wonder. The photography is beautiful, and some of the moments of a fierce intensity and great beauty. Brigitte Helm gives the greatest performance of her career. She is nothing short of marvellous. Her strange power and her strange beauty have been utterly understood and brought across. The intensity of her moods, the underlying hysteria and repression and bitter resentment are quite one of the most vibrant things that the screen has given. And Herthe van Walter as her friend has contrived to give herself a hardness she most certainly does not actually possess. Anyway, in spite of this superb characterisation, she remained a most likeable person. Her smile was always joyous, never vicious. Indeed, one's sympathy was so much more with her and her friends than with the dull, ill-mannered husband. The cabaret was to cabarets what the Paris in Jeanne Ney was to Paris. That is to say, a cabaret suddenly became something more than superimposed legs, corks, negros, saxaphones and carnival streamers. The vicious undertones of this place were deft with the deftness of the brothel in Joyless Street, and the little, thin, forlorn and quite worn out woman purveying dope was on the superb level of Valeska Gert as the entrepreneuse in Joyless Street. These were the best scenes of the film. Let it be stated that it had to be rushed through in seventeen days. It is a great film and a petty film in one. And should certainly be seen. 75