Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000156 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 #:
000156
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 and something to be insisted on. You think that perhaps if there were some Negro films, they might have the same range and sweep and drive. Themes that matter are w^hat are wanted, we know, and films made by people who dare to be big. You know that some of the black authors have the scope, and that they almost cannot help having the themes. You wonder, could there be a Negro cinema? You don't have to w^onder why there isn't. Big business makes that clear. And perhaps there couldn't be in America, and France would make it chic and run these films in outhouses in the Rue Blomet w^ith postage-stamp screens, strapontins and long, long intervals. And Germany might have, but Germany is so mixed up w^ith making films to please other coutries. It all seems very unlikely, and you go back to America, because they are, after all, beginning to make a few, though in the wrong way, and you come to the conclusion that the only thing may be that in time perhaps, among the romantic mammy pictures, one or two serious black Othello pictures may slip out. It seems that must be the only way that can happen. Quietly, one or two here and there, and not too much fuss about it. But one wishes .... one wishes there were young Negroes who could and would get together and make their films, and let us in to see them perhaps, but make them anyway, and make them black. One wishes, when one turns over in one's mind the richness laid there by Negro writers and singers, and then one looke at the screen as it is and wonders why all this w^orld finds no place there. All this world whose speed and sensitiveness and saltness and — ironically — freedom, is locked in the word black 98