Close Up (Jan-Jun 1929)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00030
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:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP more many-sidedness in one side than in American, German and most French films. And Marriage was late, not of the good period, not even a good film. But the apprehension was there. The only American films in which you get this landscape coming into its own are the Westerns. Here the earth has life. It is not for nothing that clouds of dust follow the flying hooves; the earth is exerting its parentage. The men are not rooted, but they are still related . . . earth is there, itself, alone in American films. Reality, of course. The Westerns are the nearest America has to an equivalent of the reality of the Russian films, and the reality comes from the fact that in these cowboy stories, fights with floods and fire and struggles to live, America is dealing with something of her own she knows about and not trying to pass oft' a life she has grafted on to herself. These were struggles to live. And so are the stories of which the Swedes make their films. They are sagas, if that word helps you at all. Stories of men who had to live, had to get a living from an earth that provoked that necessity. Swedish films deal at once, simply, with the living and with the earth. They're bound up. There is no saying this will look better in a mountain background no going on location to the South Seas or building a studio sandstorm — mentally, at any rate. The mountains, as I once before observed, aren't a background. The people are oft'shoots of them, another form of Hfe. Look at the Swedish films you know. What you think of is the dragging of the chest across the sxow in Arne's Treasure, the reindeer stampeding in Herrenhofsage, the torrent in Les Proscrits, the wolves across the snow in Gosta Berling. Sweeps of countrv which, as ^loussinac savs, become un des elements 16