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 #:
000551
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 or political one — by a book or a picture is the main stronghold of the formidable fortress : censorship. It's worth while to try out how this will apply to film censorship. Exposed to danger are, as far as the film is concerned, mainly the children and half adults of the urban proletariat — in rural conditions the film is no factor and the young ones of the middle classes are safeguarded by their families. Now, I don't think that any person who has a glimmering of a notion about the conditions of family life among the proletariat — as depending on the housing problems — will assert that an average proletarian child can ever see in a film anything showing sexuality in such a gross and coarse way as it is shown to it daily — or nightly — at home and near home. True, the American film **'demi-mondaines'' of the movies are far more attractive and tempting than the real ones wnom the child sees, so to speak, '*in the flesh" — but then these real ones are far less chaste and virtuous. It will take a long way of amelioration of the conditions of the working classes till the film may be considered in the light of a danger to the morality of their offspring. Let us take another point of view. Those who had reached an age of discretion 25 years ago will remember the strong and protracted outburst of public feeling in England against government methods in Russia about the time of the RussoJapanese war and shortly afterwards — at the epoch of pogroms and ''black hundreds''. Had at this time a film art existed and had there been an English director w^ith the gift of expressing his views in a vigorous and virile fashion, had this director taken the revolt of the Black Sea fleet as a subject 19