Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Page scan 000660 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000660
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
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 pool. The coolies drink the water from the fountain (we are spared a close-up showing it teeming with impurities), while we are next shown a close-up of a glass of lemonade being stirred with a straw. Yes, we feel, quite right. The coolies, too, should have these pleasant things. Dancing now on the plage to a gramophone. The Coolie looking through the fence seems to appreciate the spectacle. Sub-title (scathingly) The European and American culture We must be forgiven if we are somewhat shocked. Instead of the point being why should these things not be available to all, it was look at the corrupt taskmasters. This incident and others like it merely wasted time. The women and children working in the factories, with their babies on the floor beneath the tables where their mothers worked, together with the statement that women and children worked twelve hours per day for roughly sevenpence and twopence respectively, while the men worked fifteen hours per day, were terrible enough, and left to ourselves we would quickly enough have asked Who is responsible We have to ask it, in any case, but we are not guided to, but rather led away, from the answer by the weak and irrelevant shots of bathing pools, yachts and race meetings. The whole of the end, dealing with the mass meetings, the riots and the actual shooting of coolie prisoners (most of which was deleted when I saw it the second time because audiences do not like this sort of thing ") were enthralling and terrible. The coming of the British, French, Italian and Chinese armies to put dow^n the insurrection, and the starved, mute, desperate workers massing against them, truly a voice in the wilderness, presented more tersely and more poignantly 68