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 #:
000176
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 OF NEGRO MOTION PICTURES The traditions of" the American stage became the aphorisms of the American screen in so far as the Negro was concerned. With the single exception of David Wark Griffith's colossal spectacle — The Birth of a Nation — Negroes until very recent times were used on the screen only to provide atmosphere as servants or savages or both according to the requirements of the locale. As a spectacle Griffith's production was aw^e-inspiring and stupendous ; but as a picture of Negro life it was not only false but has done the Negro irreparable harm. And no wonder, since it was taken from a puerile novei, The Clansman, sl book written to arouse racial hate by appealing to the basest passions of the semiliterate. The success of Porgy and Blackbirds^ probably w^as the stimulus which hurried Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Fox into the production of all Negro pictures. I would like to think that the masters of Hollywood have suddenly come to the realization of the wealth of drama in Negro life, but this appears too good to be true. Surely, Hearts in Dixie, a talking picture recently released by Fox, justifies no such * Which just completed a year's unbroken performance on Broadway. 118