Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000137 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000137
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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP room and burning of the film. Long live Italy, if you feel that way about it, though clearly aesthetic motives are not to be ascribed. I won't tell you, by the way, which fam^ous German cameraman considered this daubed, unedged, grey soupiness the best photography, mein kind, the world has ever seen ! Now take (since everybody else does) the negro film and decide whether you think international cinema is here going to mean a thing when a white man directs, no matter how charmingly, blacks so that they must always seem to be direfully dependent on white man's wisdom. For all the coal black hearts in Dixie must beat to please, — meekly Uncle — Tom, pleasant, thankful serf beats. Confronted with an instability (his own) which he calls a Race Problem, the white man is always going to portray the negro as he likes to see him, no matter how benevolently. Benevolence, indeed, is the danger. Apart from being the most tricky and unkind form of human selfishness, it is often more than humbug and always less than seeing, and does to sugar coat much that is not, so to speak, edible. Stepin Fetchit can give us more than a promise though the trouble is he isn't meant to do as much. But watch him move and you will see what we mean. There is more than promise in the jungle, lissom lankness that slams down something unanswerable in front of what we let go past as beauty. This splendour of being is one good key to open a good many doors, all the way to our goal simply. Something has been given us here, set (if you will) in a physical symbol, though you might with equal truth call it a mind symbol or a psychic symbol. Something by which we know without any further 87