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 #:
000589
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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 Hollywood is as it is. With its perennial optimism and its skill in converting losses into profits, it needs neither our sympathy nor criticism. Clifford Howard. FINDS If " seeing's believing it is easy to imagine that every scene which flashes or flickers across our line of vision at the local cinema, has not necessarily been studied from the point of view of balance by the Producer. Otherwise we should have been spared a great deal of mental anguish. On the other hand, considering this, it is astonishing how from time to time, a perfectly lovely sequence is evolved in a film, which in every other respect is unworthy of exhibition. These scenes, infrequent as they may be, are due to nature rather than art, it usually must be admitted. In the average woolly west drama the plot is negligible, the acting hardly equivalent to that of a church amateur dramatic society, and details of acting, make-up, etc., are cheerfully ignored by all concerned. If it is your hard lot, therefore, to have to sit through one of these efforts, it is generally possible to learn a useful lesson from the scenery of the " great, open spaces ". 415