Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000195 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 #:
000195
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 But as he is more negroid than anything else a certain interest that attaches to him as a victim of the white man's schemes for expansion may not after all put him quite out of bounds. Throughout the film we are given the customs, the arts, and the frenzied dances of the two tribes, but all this fails to give us the intimacy, a sensitive appreciation of the dawnings of mind in these primitive children as did *'Nionga", or as was particularly exemplified in ''Chang". In *'Nionga" the cruelties and torturous practices of the natives took on new meaning and human importance. Out of superstitious beliefs that had been preserved simply because they had continued to serve them well, had grown a tradition, a crude morality, a preparedness of the individual for self-sacrifice — even to death by burning — for the benefit of the tribe. Incomprehensible to most of us of different experience and different knowledge, no doubt, but no more incomprehensible than the cruel proscriptions and persecutions of our day will be to future generations. But in '*Under the Southern Cross" details of the natives' practices and customs have been taken and pieced together upon a framework of screen conventions. The significance of the *'tapu" — an important thread in the theme — is negatived by the introduction of an hen-pecked male, to cite a single deviation, who is pulled by the ear for ogling lasciviously at the owner of a pair of heaving but comely hips. A phenomenon, by all the signs, he witnessed at least once every day of his life and, therefore, one which would occasion no sudden interest even if his mind w^ere free D 12&