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 #:
000385
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 are getting adequate expression of when they pay five-andnine to stand at The Gaiicho or eight-and-six to see ^Ir. and Mrs. Johnson being shot far more often than the simbas in their long news-gazette. Robert Herring. DISCONNECTED THOUGHTS ON MUSIC AND THE CINEMA By Oswell Blakeston How they give themselves away I You or I reallv ou^-ht to walk into their studios and demand the right to produce a film: for they hold their positions on the understanding that they have a sense of the screen — and in film after film thev feature a jazz band I What could be less filmable? Take a blind man to the Leicester Galleries, a deaf one to the Wigmore Hall, no less inane than proudly shown close-ups of fashionable syncopators. Jazz is filmable, but not jazz bands. Neither is tearful superimposition of several instruments the only way of conveying the dynamic force of negro vitalitv. A film without its jazz band, its cabaret (and the heroine breaking her heart amidst the paper streamers^ would surely be accused by the trade papers of indift'erent direction. Producers would answer me, I am sure, were I to question 39