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 #:
000204
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:
November 07, 2023
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192 CLOSE UP at an unfamiliar way of speech or American slang will not help towards mutual understanding'. And above all, in the choice of films to see, remember the many directors, actors and film architects, who have been driven out of the German studios and scattered across Europe, because they believed in peace and intellectual liberty. The future is in our hands for every person influences another. The film societies and small experiments raised the general level of films considerably in five years. It is for you and me to decide whether we will help to raise respect for intellectual liberty in the same wav, or whether we all plunge, in every kind and color of uniform, towards a not to be imagined barbarism. Bryher. STORM OVER HOLLYWOOD At the present moment of writing a resolution has been introduced in the United States House of Representatives calling for the appointment of a Congressional committee to investigate the American film industry. According to the charges set forth in support of the resolution, " assets of corporations within the industry are being dissipated, dividends are being passed, stock values are being lowered, and nothing is being done to protect the rights of stockholders. Moreover, many picture corporations are asking for or being placed in the hands of receivers, are going into bankruptcy or being involved in equity proceedings, due to existing conditions within the industry itself and to financial operations of outside elements seeking control of the industry." Whether the film magnates, through their heretofore powerful political influence, will be able to forestall this threatened investigation, is neither here nor there. The significance of the immediate circumstances lies in the fact it points an expressive finger at the heart of the present critical situation of the American cinema. The fantastic extravagance that for more than a decade has characterized the management of the industry would alone years ago have wrecked any ordinary business, and when to this there has been added a giddy revel of stock juggling and madcap speculation, with producers more interested in playing the market than in making pictures, an already bewildered world stands lost in amazement at Hollywood's so long evasion of the inevitable whirlwind. However, out of the clouds of the depression the storm has broken at last. Whether it will have blown itself out bv the time this appears in print, is, like everything else pertaining to Hollywood, beyond logical calculation. At any rate, history has already recorded that its preliminary blasts swept three major companies into bankruptcy, closed the studios of two others,