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 #:
000346
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 People are not entertained by the little home that is going to be sold up, or by the One Condition the rich man makes before promising not to hand over the erring brother to the police. Nor by the untimely hour of night at which the spotless heroine pays her call to plead for him. .... If I'm not careful Til be giving people ideas for yet more entertainment along the smoothly running railway lines of good scenarios. People, I say, are not entertained by these and their twin stock-in-trade screen, situations. They accept them, tolerate them, comment on them. Isn't she sweet, isn't he a brute, hasn't she a sad face. What actually does happen is this. Four-fifths of the cinema public goes to the cinema as escape, or rest, or refuge from rain, boredom, dullness, strain, sorrow, hate. The cinema, in other words, is a palliative to them. Somewhere where they can sink, so to speak, to their intellectual lowest, where they can brood, dream, drift, pick up and discard fragments of thoughts and plans, get out of themselves into the strangely potent drug of dark and light and music. All these naturally need no more than what they get. They think that people like myself are an untimely nuisance, and that the movies are perfect as they are. I myself have staggered from the rarified beauty of Soviet films, feeling that the only thing I can bear, the only thing I can look at will be one of those utterly bad, facile, brilliant Hollywood comedies, charming antidote to greatness. There is the thing in a nutshell. People stagger to the movies in this way, to get away from themselves, from problems they have gnawed to bits, and worries worn shapeless. Obliteration of identity is the cinema's great gift. 8