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 #:
00055
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 47 The first Yiddish film by Shpiss, " The Return of Nathan Becker." " he retour de Nathan Becker," premier film Yiddish de Shpiss. Der erste jiddische Film von Shpiss, " Die Riickkehr des Nathan Becker." A FILM ACTOR Everyone theorises about film direction in these days; acting is left oddly alone. We praise this or that player; we are agreed that Jannings, Krauss, Kortner, a few others, are great actors ; we go no further. But in the intervals of seeing and admiring their films, we faintly suspect that film acting is no good. In the principle there is something wrong. Pudovkin, when he raised his " Out with the Actor " cry, matched a suspicion that was already there. The documentary, the travel-film, the German peasant idyll and the Soviet mass idyll, offered a kind of escape, but not exactly a solution, for we felt that it would be foolish to restrict to them the field of the cinema. Meanwhile the films of great acting go on, and we go to them, and grow more and more suspicious. From the plaver's point of view, the art is undoubted ; but from the point of view of cinema . . . ? Look at Laughton in Payment Deferred, at Jannings in almost any of his star-films, the end of The Blue Angel, for