Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00064 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 #:
00064
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 2. Kayn and Artem, bv Petroff-Bitoff . A film from the book of Gorki. What has Mr. PetroffBitoff been up to? Squalor he wants, and squalor he gets. From the dying cods, fretted with fiy swarms, and the refuseheavy market to the death-throes of the hero under the playful trickle of a sewer-pipe, nothing has been left to the imagination. Quite a nice girl with a surlv face is raped behind her fish stall. Quite a nice little man, Kayn, the Marxian idealist \\ho looks and acts like a neurasthenic muskrat, is made to dance till he drops by unkempt sadists, who prod him whenever he flags, with knives. Quite an attractive bully, Artem, is turned into a somewhat wishv-washv citizen by his little satellite, the adoring musk-rat. There is a tugof-W'ar between Artem and a butcher across tw^o roofs, with a road between, and a nice, friendlv plough, with upturned prongs W'aiting to impale the loser. The girl abandons religion and life. The bullv is beaten, mobbed and flung in the river by his enemies. The musk-rat saves him. Luscious shots of his tormented, tortured, and blood-soaked body. What has ]\Ir. Bitoff been up to? I enjoyed it, though everything looked overcrowded for davs afterwards. It's a joke film, but if you let it be a joke, it's even a good one. There is a good sequence in a church. Adoration of nuns before an altar becomes nuns left-turning, right-turning, about-turning — a squad of die-hards, their faces drawn in the implacable lines of ill-temper usuallv most marked in the faces of company sergeant majors. Kayn and Artem, or Lust's Labour Lost. I wish you could all see it ! K. ^I. 42