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 #:
000462
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 an upward curve, and responsibility is traced to the coincidental increase in the number of moving-picture theatres. The statistics show a decrease, and the slowness of depreciation is blamed on the brutaHties of Beery or the machinations of Mix. The bulging prison cells and overcrowded reformatories demand an analysis. The Chief of the Police in the Vaud department of Switzerland has just concluded such an analysis. His results make interesting reading for the long-faced fraternity. For a year he investigated the cases of evildoers between the ages of ten and twenty. Of those examined he found that 30 per cent, had never been to a cinema. These were, however, the ones who had committed the most serious offences. Of the 70 per cent, who had frequented the picture palaces, 6 per cent, could not remember any details other than that they had been to the pictures, 48 per cent, had only seen documentary and topical pictures, comics and fairy fantasies, films which are not wont to contain incitements to murder or unchastity. Of the 80 or 90 per cent, who had been guilty of theft, 30 per cent, had stolen in order to go to the pictures, and the remainder for the more traditional purpose of buying toffee or tops, 16 per cent, were found to have visited films of doubtful morality, but they were also reported as frequenters of dance halls of a morality even more doubtful. M. Jaquillard, the Chief of Police, in making this report, expresses the opinion that the cinema is one of the most useful and beautiful of modern inventions ever bestowed on mankind. There is ^ psychological process known as displacement. The cinema as an alleged cause of crime offers a convenient 6