Close Up (Jan-Jun 1930)

Page scan 000159 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 #:
000159
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 Mark Dintenfass commissioned Irene Wallace, a ScotchIrishwoman, to prepare tor the Universal Company a scenario relating the grant of freedom to the Jews of Poland by the good King Kasimir. This might have indicated to alert entrepreneurs a rich field of subject-matter of historic and folk content. At that time occurred the infamous Mendel Beiliss case, with its cruellv absurd blood-accusation against the Jews. Films issued upon this theme and upon the general theme of persecutions in Russia : Nihilist Vengeance, The Heart of a Jeii'ess, The Terrors of Russia, The Black Hundred, etc. In 1912 the American Solax Company, in advertising their film, A Man's Man, said, " Up to verv recently the stage Jew was the only type which furnished universal amusement. Long whiskers, derby hat down to the ears and hands moving like the fins of a fish. His manhood, his sentim^ents and his convictions are not burlesqued (that is, not in this film, A Man's Man) but are idealized. The Reliance Company produced Solomon' s Son, so their notice read, " with dignity, minus the burlesque atmosphere usually attending the Gentile's version of a Jewish story." The burlesque-Jew enters the films verv early from vaudeville and the burlesque theatre. It is this Jew, John Howard Lawson, the American playwright, put into Processional as the American acceptation of the Jew, a caricature of the immigrant's appearance and gestures. If the movie or theatre wanted a valid comic or gesturing Jew there was a stage-Jew at hand who was valid, the stereotype Jew of the Yiddish theatre, a vivid character amid the shoddiness of B 99