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 #:
000463
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP displacement for the mentalities who are too lazy or too unequipped to think profoundly. To blame the films automatically for crime and vice saves them the trouble of further thought. But when a realist such as M. Jaquillard gets down to concrete facts and analysis, the cloudy theories vanish as clouds alone can do. All of which speaks (very eloquently) for itself. Disclosures like this are no doubt the reason why statisticians are so unpopular. Certainly if our cinemas are haunts of vice I don't know what we ought to do about the censorship. For on the one hand it is agreed the censor is something only slightly less incorruptible than the Creator Himself, then why does his seal of approval, signed, stamped and displayed, rest upon films which drive the young like flocks of sheep into penitentiaries, prisons and the hereafter ? These statistics come from Vaud, where Close Up comes from. Vaud is a canton, by the way, where Russian films are not prohibited. Mothety for example, has been freely going the rounds of late, in the same original version in which you saw it recently (we hope) at the London Film Society (to which heartfelt thanks). Likewise The Passion of Joan of Arc, Expiation, and others of the same genre where primitive passion (to coin an almost technical phrase) is seen in its most revengeful and bloodcurdling aspects. We would like an English and American and French and German M. Jaquillard to make the same investigations, and prove to us what we already know, that films stop crime, not make it, not by influence, perhaps, but by the very fact of giving young people something to occupy their minds and time. 7