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 #:
000484
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
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

CLOSE UP Sunday afternoons, broken by somewhat alarming diagrams in what seemed to be a quite irrational manner. It was convincing proof however that science and entertainment value have nothing in common, and as compared with Mechanics of the Brain or Bed and Sofa, this film must be regarded as a failure, at least in the form in which it was presented the other night. We are also becoming convinced that the specialized presentation of such films to small audiences serves little purpose. They were made for the young and the workers and where neither are represented in the audience there is only the impression that a great deal of fuss has been made about a point which intelligent people accept without question. A purely scientific film which offered fresh data of medical value would be valuable and of great interest ; to show a censored story and a few diagrams merely builds mystery round a straightforward situation. AN AMATEUR FILM OF DISTINCTION. The Gaiety of Nations, stills of which are included in this issue, is a remarkably good essay in creative imagination produced by two members of the London A.C.A., Mr. J. H. Ahern and Mr. G. H. Sewell. The entire film, 350 feet in length, was made, with the exception of one or two shots, in a room 15 feet by 11 feet, and models were mainly employed. The life of a city — an)^ city — in Europe is suggested — 346