Close Up (Mar-Dec 1932)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1932
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000201
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:
February 22, 2024
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CLOSE UP 187 back to 1910. It is too funny to watch by what means the young generation, in the first specimen of this series, The False Tenor — hope to produce a comic effect. If the general director of the Ufa, Mr. Ludwig KUtzsch, had seen this httle film before his thorough lecture over the radio, he would have been less enthusiastic perhaps, in his estimate of the progress of the German sound film since 1929. A mistake such as the confusion of the elements of sound, film technique and film craft, with the artistic growth of the sound film, could not have happened to him in his other province, as the head of the Scherl publishing firm. Mr. Klitzsch measures the progress of the film by the approach of the levels of cinema and theatre and forgets that this approach is possible only through the incomparably bigger step made backward by the stage play than forward by the film. For years we tread the same spot and call it motion. Perhaps in this manner we advance a little, for time runs back past us. A. Kraszna-Krausz. The occupants of a Berlin tenement point up to the window from ivhich an unemployed boy jumped to death, in " Kiihle Wanipe." Les locataires d'un immeuble ouvrier designent la fenetre d'oii un jeune chomeiir s'est precipite afin d'en fi?iir avec la vie. " Kiihle Wampe." Die Beivohner eines Berliner Miethauses deuten auf das Fenster, aus ivelchem sich ein arbeitsloser Junge gestiirst hat. " Kiihle Wampe."