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 #:
000464
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 Thirty per cent, stole, we learn, in order to go to the cinema. No need for a long face here. I believe, quite honestly, I might have been tempted to do so myself when young if no means had been forthcoming. For the kind of morality in question here is the purely arbitrary code invented by adults for mutual convenience, the economical advantages and reasons for which would hardly be likely to impress a child who wanted at the time something far more advantageous and convenient. This is certainly no reason against the cinema. Rather it is propaganda for cinema. If children want it so much a system whereby they can have it should be evolved. Yet what do we have instead? Massed educational authorities attempting to coerce the censor into making all films illegal to children. When actually it is the educational authorities themselves who are entirely to blame. Kenneth Macpherson. FILM PSYCHOLOGY The plot, whether of a novel, play or film, consists of closely interwoven psychological coherencies. The film can be effective only in so far as it is able to make these psychological coherencies visible ; in so far as it can externalise and make perceptible — if possible in movement — invisible inward events. 8