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 #:
000550
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:
August 29, 2022
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CLOSE UP MODERN WITCH-TRIALS A further article from the pen of Dr. Hanns Sachs, emineni Viennese psychoanalyst, dealing with the question of censorship. His thousand words of scientific examination are more than enough to puncture the pondorous bladder and deflate it of its copious hot-air ! A few months ago I read about a trial against a book describing a form of human love not acknowledged hitherto either by acts of parliament or by popular story writers : the love relations between two women. A modern witch-trial is bound to have its modern ways : the attorney for the prosecution admitted that the book in question was a serious work of art, far from frivolity or lasciviousness, but — and in this culminated everything that was said in favour of the prosecution — we must think of those who are in danger of falling, those who waver between virtue and vice and may, by the impression of such a book wrought on their weak minds, be tempted away from nomality and flung into everlasting perdition. Judge and jury and the court of appeal applauded this sane argument and dammed the book unhesitatingly — which, I sincerely hope, has done something to enlarge its circulation. Anyhow, the thesis of the danger of the unprotected ones who may get lured into vice — a moral 18