Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00021 from Close Up

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Jan-Jun 1930
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00021
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 THE CENSORSHIP PETITION Readers who were actively interested, will doubtless, for some time past, have been wondering what has happened to the Petition for the Revision of Film Censorship inaugurated by Close Up something over a year ago. But only those with no previous experience of the business of assembling and launching this kind of document will be surprised to learn that its outward and visible career, of which it is now possible to give a full account, ended only last week. For the benefit of new readers it must be explained that the petition came into being as a result of the state of mind induced in the editors of Close Up when, fresh from seeing what was being done in some of the leading continental studios, they contemplated the impassable barriers erected between the English public and all foreign films of artistic, scientific and educational value. This state of mind must have been shared by many who had seen good foreign films and wished to give the half-starved English film-lovers the chance of seeing first-class work. But, apparently it did not occur to anyone to do anything beyond tantalising, by descriptions of what they themselves had seen, those who had no chance of seeing, and, from time to time, fulminating mildly in the press against censorship in general. Nobody did anything until these enterprising young people (who for a year and more, aided and abetted by a staft' who shared their views, while still in England the cinema was a discredited resort