Close Up (Jul-Dec 1929)

Page scan 000348 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 #:
000348
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 PHOTO-GENESIS. A collection tracing all man's efforts to depict movement is for sale in London. It is that famous collection formed during the last thirty years by Will Day, who by dint of having scouts active for him almost evervwhere has succeeded in running to earth many pieces of early apparatus that would otherwise have jerked into rust on junk-heaps. The famous animal on a cave wall in Spain (isn't it?) with many legs given it by an artist trying to show it running ... a Chinese shadowgraph of the year 200 ... a Thaumotrope pictures taken by row of cameras with threaded shutters . . . many Friese Greene relics .... and one of those many pieces of the First Film (how long it must have been). Films occur too, but are not an important part of the collection, which deals with the means by which the illusion of movement is given, and so concentrates on apparatus. It is an exciting thing that ]\Ir. Day has done, and it was even more exciting if vou think what the cinema was then, when he began it. Most of us weren't conscious and a disgusting nimiber of those who were weren't movie-conscious. Quite a lot of us mightn't have been, either. Consider the reception given to the invention of talkies — the invention, not the almost always abominable product. The collection is to be sold in one lot by ^lessrs Harris and Gillow, who estimate it at a quarter of a million pounds. But though it would have this value to film-students, it can hardly be expected to have it for the kind of person who buys firsts of Alice in Wonderland and will probably go for several less thousands, which alters our opinion of ]\Ir. Day's 248