Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 00093 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 #:
00093
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 contribute their gifts and their personalities to the rejuvenated screen — prompted both by the adventure of it and the lure of much gold. But for all of the rich promise inherent in these spectacular preparations and glittering names, and for all of the popularity of the talkies and their present big profits, Hollywood is uneasy. Beneath its smiling front of assurance and voluble ballyhoo is a gnawing fear — a fear of the morrow. Its canny eye is fixed warily on the corner ahead. The shadow of a lurking menace lies athwart an otherwise bright and rosy path. Any moment the thing around the corner may stalk forth and work confusion and disaster. For the same spirit of desperate necessity that conceived and gave birth to the talkie has engendered other inventions. Its fertility was not reckoned on. Its progeny now promises to be a litter. Had its offspring been limited to the vocal film, Hollywood could have settled dow^n undistractedly to its upbringing and development. The impetus of time need not have proved immediately disturbing. It would merely have hurried the maturing of the talkie. But this is not to be. The menace around the corner is the imminence of other oft'spring, other inventions, that will demand the recognition and support of Hollywood as their parent. HoUyw^ood has scarcely yet recovered from the unsettling shock of the birth of the talkie — its disrupting effect upon the movie industry ; its call for the scrapping of established methods, routine, materials on hand, plans for the future, and the installing in their place of a new order, a new business, a new equipment, a distinctly difi'erent, untried and complicated form of production. And now it 63