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 #:
000390
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP producer and employed myself as director and leading actor without pay. Our first production was Crossing the Great Sagrada, a burlesque travel film. It cost eighty pounds, and w^as 900 feet long, one-third being titles, one-third cut-outs from old travel pictures and one-third pictures of myself attitudinising in various Clarksonian disguises. Sagrada — excuse the loving abbreviation — had a prerelease showing at the London Tivoli and was run at hundreds of theatres throughout the United Kingdom (none of my burlesques have been shown abroad). Yes — and the Kinemato graph Weekly hailed me as The Leacock of the Screen Also, one of the biggest American firms sent for me with a view to work in Hollywood. wSo you see what might happen to anyone with a cine-camera and a roving commission. Encouraged, but as yet unpaid by my renters, I plunged further into the Masurian swamp of production finance. Bitten by the cry for bigger and better pictures, I launched on a ninety-pound production, which I called The Pathetic Gazette, I attitudinised more in my early Clarksons, sometimes in bathing costume (no Narcissism this — just the purest economy), and induced my cameraman, Henry Harris, to do the same while I took charge of the camera. The same glittering result — Tivoli, Leacock, bookings and What about it ? from Hollywood. And no money from the renters. In fact, they went broke and I met my Tannenburg. Again I retired from production until Michael Balcon, the Lasky of British Films, introduced me to C. M. Woolf and for them I embarked on five more burlesques — Battling 44