Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

Record Details:

Title:
Close Up
Date:
Mar-Dec 1933
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
00042
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early 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:
November 07, 2023
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34 CLOSE UP Warner, production chief, announces that: " Newspapers will be watched this year as the} were last for ideas and plots." We may divide these topical films into two categories : social segment films, personality films. Unfortunately, the individualistic, star-systematized cinema makes no strenuous effort to make one of the two, which is the Soviet intention. Of the Warner pictures the two that come nearest to this unification are : The Cabin in the Cotton and I am a Fugitive. This approximation is made possible by two facts : these are not stories about " prodigious " personalities (as in the case of The Match King and Silver Dollar) where the social happening is popularly obscured by the quasilegendarv figure ; they are stories haying widespread reference quicklv discernible in the current scene. Because they have widespread reference, it is worth our while to see how this reference is handled in the film. The Cabin in the Cotton is not an exceptionally arresting film in its direction, its central person is earnestly but not vibrantly enacted by Richard Barthelmess, remnant of the Griffith camp, but its subject-matter is the most important the American film has risked in vears. It is the class-struggle. Does this mean, however, that the movie has yielded its restriction on films of the struggle between capital and labor? Not at all. The newsreels still keep out clips that might refer to that warfare, the steel trust has time and time again stipulated that it will not permit the use of its premises to enact that struggle. A film like Taxi was not borne along its logical motif of the struggle between the taxi-trust and the privately-owned taxi. I understand Cagney wanted such a story, but it was rejected as being "labor v. capital" ! I know a young man in the publicity department of one of the largest companies who wrote a scenario situated in Pittsburgh. His scenario won him a job in the editorial department, but the scenario itself was rejected as being too much on the labor-theme, although the author was very careful to keep any semblance of that theme remotely in the background, where everything important is usually kept (in the capitalistic cinema). And then there was the controversv over the Boulder (Hoover) Dam scenario', when the delegated scenarists found " forced labor " in the American enterprise. The net result of the controversv was two scenarists " canned " and a strengthening" of the dictum against " capital-labour films." The class-struggle as expressed in The Cabin in the Cotton is agrarian. The action is set in a locale not the most remunerative to the film, not the most influential in effecting opinion and not on the most intimate terms with industrial and finance capital. Observe that no tie-up is made between the agrarian and the industrial South, a tie-up very real to-day in our economic Society. Our world is an industrial one basically, and it is in the basic segment that no studv is even remotely attempted. Therefore, while the movie will dare an / am a Fugitive, it renders prison-life in the industrial North as