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 #:
00047
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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CLOSE UP 39 like the chain-gang is not indicated in / am a Fugitive, as it was in Hell's Highway. If these two films could have been mixed for their better elements the complete chain-gang picture might have been realized. The latter film was begun by Rowland Brown and, by its first part, reassured us that we were not wrong in admiring that director's initial picture, Quick Millions. He seems to have the surest, cleanest directorial hand of anv newcomer in the last several years, and is as resistant to curleycues as he has been to the film hierarchy. The original scenario of Hell's Highway had in authors Samuel Ornitz and Brown, two socially-conscious individuals, and that possibly accounts for the fact that the film lias a base to start from : the chain-gang exists for the private contractor that he may have cheap labor for his competitive bid. It is this fact that I am a Fugitive needs. However, Hell's Highway absolves the state from connivance in the sweat-box; Fm a Fugitive provides the state as nemesis. In the latter also, a cause, unemployment, leads to a result, the chain-gang, in the instance of the central person ; in the former there is no such relationship, and the central person is a cliche. Neither film avoids the picturesque, particularly in the Negro singing — operatic in the Le Roy film, vaudevillian in the Brown. Unless the singing can be related with penetration to the setting, it is dangerous diversion and is better omitted. Similarly, the scene in the hangout in the Le Roy film between the runaway and the sympathetic girl is better omitted than presented hurriedly and lacking in the essential qualities of tenderness and poignancy, for which the film has not prepared the way and from which there is no development. In its literalness, the American movie includes every episode and renders too kaleidoscopic a film demanding scrutiny. But, for all irs insufficiencies, / am a Fugitive is an advance in American film-content and to that extent its form is shaped. Will it be a jumping-off place for more progressive films or an end-stop? Indications point to renewed concessions by the social segment film to the aggrandisement of the personage who should be the character-convergent for the happenings. Though The Match King does contain some probable Kreuger data verv glibly set into motion in the effrontery of Kroll (" Kr " from Kreuger "oil " from Toll) it is a delectable cad we get and not a peak-phenomenon of egregious economy in collapse. Anv suggestion of a possible deduction of general pertinence is subdued, although in the bribery of the Polish minister something did slip through. Silver Dollar is the tale of an all-to-human superman and not the striking instance of the battle of the financiers. The defeat of silver is treated almost as a hastily improvised snubbing of Yates Martin (H. A. A. Tabor in reality), whose vulgarity, we are somehow left to feel, brought on the defeat. January '3rd. H. A. Potamkin.