Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000143 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 #:
000143
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 certainly the commercial cinema is responsible for the avant garde. And somewhere in between comes something that is balance perhaps, if that is also not a myth. What has been proved conclusively is that there is not and never has been and perhaps never will be, a good him. That is what makes the study of films so fascinating. To begin to understand them vou have to understand so much besides — people, races, trends, the outgiven, quantitative statement of national character and characteristic all the world over, and the modification resultant from the absorption of external influence. An international chess game, in fact. The good, the formidable, the fabelhaft American film, as seen through French eyes, and again through German eyes, may in two different ways of mental approach lead to agreement. This very formidable, this fabelhaft, this gem of vigour, speed and wit, may in the land of its birth be the biggest egg that ever was a curate's I The kitsch film, stamped with Ufa's diamond square, mav run for months in Iceland or Tierra del Fuego, figuratively speaking ; knock all records for a triumph of artistic wonder. It may never even make a trade show for our British deadheads. It narrows down to fights between friends that in a past decade would soon have swelled the number of duels at dawn. People simplv do not agree. And it makes a fascinating study, though a complicated one. Take Eisenstein. He told me (before I had seen The General Line, so all was well) that bv the portions of this film which different people object to he can tell all about their sex life ! The reasons will be divulged in future pages, but it has something to do with physiological-psychological reflex 91