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 #:
000367
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Early Cinema, Switzerland, 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 ative quality of the commerce-constricted internationalism of the film industry with large-scale hotel catering. It will be understood that I like between whiles to sample the products of France, America, China. But indifferent menus I cannot tolerate. Who carefully offends no palate will also arouse none. The film that falls foul of nothing, has no rough edges, no sharp corners, will leave no impression. A communal production, with an Austrian operetta libretto, worked over by a Hungarian dramatist, built by a French architect, photographed by an Italian camera-man, cut by a German director, acted by players from Russia, Sweden and Honolulu, and traded by an American agency, might w^ell result in a most ingenious and only too easily digested salad. But one would not be aware of having eaten anything. Personally, I would prefer a dish that shocks the stomach and gives it something to do. The peculiar flavour of such a dish is remembered for a considerable time. Thus I am still aware that The Covered Waggon, by James Cruse, was an American film; La Roue, by Abel Gance, a French film; Erotikon, by Maurice Stiller, a Sw^edish ; Potemkin, by S. M. Eisenstein, a Russian ; and Die Geheimnisse Einer Seele, by G. W. Pabst, a German. And if to-morrow a film appears that is as English, or Japanese, or Indian, as these were American, French, Swedish, Russian and German, it will find me ready to acclaim it. I shall cherish, and may love it; even though my racial, national and personal susceptibilities be, in either or in each, severely sacrificed. But poems in Esperanto I refuse to read. And I doubt that either Baudelaire, Byron or Schiller could have been persuaded to write in any language so circumscribed. 21