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 #:
000174
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 intelligently examined the negro as subject-matter, that they know a great deal about him and his experiences, then the problem film of the negro can be attempted, for the problem will be comprised then, and only then, in a complete experience of a people. It is indeed reassuring that literature in dealing with the negro has become more sympathetic. The sympathy, however, has not extended as yet to the formal material, the convertible raw stuff — it is humanitarian, and that is good. But in the humanitarian sentiment one still detects considerable patronage, indulgence, condescension and an attitude hardly judicious, that of the examiner of an oddity. In the documentary films of Burbidge and the Cobham journey, the captions are frequently supercilious, and in a document of a polar trip, a bit of non-documentation is perpetrated for humor : a negro hand runs off scared upon seeing a polar-bear, safely bound, hauled upon the deck. These Caucasian evidences will persist a long time and wherever they will persist, there will be no proper attitude towards the negro as subjectmatter. Then is the hope in negro films turned by negroes ? That would be a hope, if the American negro had given evidence of caring for and understanding his own experience sufficiently to create works of art in the other mediums. But the American negro as graphic artist has shown very little awareness of this experience ; as writer he is imitative, respectable, blunt, ulterior and when he pretends to follow negro materials, he does little more than duplicate them. Of course there are exceptions. The exceptions, I believe, will eventually create the rule. But that rule will be created 116