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 #:
000252
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 offered this as a tip for the next war. Conferences at the Hague and elsewhere illustrate quite well the point. Yes, the sound iilm_w^ar has its heroism. Human nature snaps back to virility when fortunes are at stake. The one pity, perhaps, is that the motivation should remain at a constantly so unresolvent level. And under one war, as usual, another. The American bank rate not so long ago w^as raised. You remember the millions of dollars instant depreciation of securities that was so many fortunes lo^st, and the next day's quick recoveries? This may have had nothing to do with talking films, and nothing to do, perhaps, with bankers' decisions, but the fact remains that almost at once we heard that the bankers behind the American producing firms were ordering cuts in talkie overhead — orders which affected most of the big studios and most of the big combines. A clue, perhaps — well, let us pry ! Talkie production — had you not read it yourself — was so cheap. We had heard it as well as read it. Fewer sets was one of their reasons — a reason only too readily to be apprehended. As many sets, shall we say, as 'scenes in any three-act play. Much cheaper. Fewer cameramen. Less film in consequence exposed. Less montage. Less tentative in taking. Less waste, reshooting. The Stroheim ten-feet-used-and-a-million-scrapped already in the history book among quaint customs of our ancestors. One cameraman as glass encased and stolid as the waxest fruit of a past epoch, grinding scenes of which the four hundred feet limit of his film is only at the first strangled sob in the heroine's speech to her sweetie. 168