Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000343
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 Vol. Ill No. 4 October 1928 AS IS BY THE EDITOR A little white-faced man sat in a chair waving his arms at me, and rapping home his point with great intensity. " People,'* he said, " don't want to think. They won't think." Hundreds of people have said just that in just that way to me for years and years. People, apparently, won't think. People keep on exasperatedly discovering it. People won't think. It is a fact which no-one can dispute; indeed, one which no-one has disputed. People won't think because they very often can't. Their capacity in that direction, such as it is, is exhausted by the competition and striving of their daily lives. And to think in the sense that thinking is meant by those who say people won't think, is to have ideas, theories ; to be, or to have the making of, a philosopher. Now the argument that is made when you suggest that the cinema should be used to make people think is that people don't want to be taught but entertained; that they go to the 5