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 #:
000553
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 — absolutely the same as in any pornographic picture. And yet it seems that this scene passed censorship even in chaste U.S.A. from whence it comes— whereas many pictures of ''Ways to Strength and Beauty'' w^hich certainly were not intended to stir sexual reaction and could hardly do so, had to be cut out because the beautiful athletic bodies were ''stark naked." How about th^ "danger problem" here? I trust I have made it clear that this "danger" business is shear bunk being just a thin disguise of something else, to which disguise cling many well intentioned persons who ought to know better. The tendency of censorship as shown above is simply to deny the existence of certain facts w^hich are not in accordance with the code of life which censorship tries to uphold as the only existing one. In print, especially in scientific discussion they may be admitted, in the movies, which appeal to the emotional side of an indefinite number of people they are to be treated as if they didn't exist. This "as if" is the centre of the problem ; the true meaning of censorship is nothing more or less than the maintaining of a fiction — the queer idea that things are not what they are as long as you don't say so. The psychoanalyst knows a mechanism which works exactly the same way in the individual mind and plays a great part in early development. The child, as long as its personality is still weak and undeveloped, has not the weapons of experience and judgment to defend itself against untoward emotions and to solve the many and grave conflicts in its mind. In face of these indissoluble difficulties it resorts to a more primitive way of reaction: it "represses" those facts,—