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 #:
000207
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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CLOSE UP 195 After so lamentable a literature, it is easier to understand the spirit of the organisers. Les plaisirs de la photographic ne sont pas moindres en hiver qu'en ete. Bien que la lumiere soit moins vive et que les jours soient plus courts, il est encore possible de prendre des scenes fort interessantes et meme, grace a la haute sensibilite des Emulsions photographiques modernes, des sujets animes. It is hard to believe ! One trembles to think what would be the tone of a real exhibition of cinematography should so dangerous an idea ever strike them ! J. L. The Film Societv of New York has imported and exhibited L' Affaire est dans le Sac, the Prevert bouff e-fi\m with the young American actress Lora Hays, and the Bunuel-Dali sardonic L'Age d'Or. Revivals include Clarence Badger's Ray Griffith farce Pass to Paradise and Mamoulian's inaugural film Applause, and Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poete. Among the short films there have been Moholy-Nagy's Lichtspiel, a prehistoric Muybridge " au ralenti " clip, a thrilling document of Moscow celebrations, Walt Disney's first colour symphony Flowers and Trees (a later one King Neptune having been shown on the first program), Mail, the Russian multiplication-film of which I wrote (as Post) in March, 1931, Close Up, Nesting of the Sea Turtle, bv Flovd Crosby and Robert Ferguson, etc. The Film Forum, favoring films of social content, started with Lang's M, followed with Dovzhenko's Ivan, and has shown Kuhle Wampe, Elvey's High Treason (despite its tawdriness, because New York suppressed it) and Pudovkin's Mother, a 16 mm print. Mr. Weinberg has mentioned that this film was suppressed some years ago. It is, of course, not, as Mr. Weinberg wrote, a pogrom-story but a picture of a revolutionary strike of the 1905 period. Its suppression was not a typical one, but Avas the work of the Treasury department at the Mexican border. More (or less) than a question of subject-matter was involved. In the supporting program of the Forum there have been a Russian plastic animation, newsreels by the Workers' Film and Photo League, portions of the National Board of Review's compilation The March of the Movies, a newsreel symposium arranged by the Forum on Hitler and Hitlerism, and a Fox Magic Carpet travelog Gorges of the Giants, one of the most remarkable films made. The concluding sequence of the Yangtze boatmen caught in the skein of their ropes, foreheads almost touching the ground, is one of the most drastic portions the screen has exhibited. The Film Forum is holding, with the Picture Department of the New York Public Library, an exhibit of stills at the latter place. Jay Leyda of the Workers' Film and Photo League lias arranged the display, which ranges historically from the movie's beginnings to the present, geographically from Hollywood circling the /globe eastward to Europe and Japan, aesthetically from the narrative-film to the abstract. Included are interesting pre-war American posters, and Russian and Japan posters of more recent years. H_ A> p>