Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1929
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000173
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 should be drawn from a source in the vocal experience of the negro, the medicine doctor's dance from a source in the choreographic experience. But beware I We do not want ethnography, this is no document. I am not asking for the insertions of Storm over Asia; I am asking for a tightly interwoven pattern. The sources are only sources. Folk, race are not complete in themselves. Dialect is not an aesthetic end. I am not asking for the duplications such as Langston Hughes writes. We shall have enough of these and they will be nothing but records, and records lacking even intelligent selection and commentary. What I have said in my remarks upon the negro in art and literature will indicate what the ideal negro-film must not be and must be. The documentary film is ethnographic. The documentary film is a source, but even in a document one cannot place everything and there must be concessions to the form. In the constructed film of the negro, the art-film let us say, the problem will always be, not the negro in society, but the negro in the film. The problem will not be that of Edward Sheldon's The Nigger, filmed years ago with William Farnum (Fox Film The Governor) . That sort of play in reality omits the negro, just as A DolVs House actually gave us no woman but a thesis. We are, I hope, far away now from films about the black peril " — although The Birth of a Nation is still with us and " the yellow peril " is a constant offering. The problem of intermarriage and inter-race is not likely to be honestly dealt with on the American screen for a long time, but I do not complain of that — the problem play has generally been dull drama, it would be even duller cinema. When the cinematists have shown that they have 115