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 #:
000217
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 205 Not having learned his lesson from experience, Theodore Dreiser has sold Jennie Gerhardt to Paramount to film' with Sylvia Sydney in the title role. Why Paramount should lavish any more care on Jennie Gerhardt than it did on An American Tragedy, no one professes to know, unless the director or supervisor also becomes suddenly " deranged," like the President in Gabriel over the White House, and actually films the story as it was written. The choice of Sylvia Sydney as Jenny is perfect, however, if we want to reach for straws of comfort so early. . . And by the time this appears, Marlene Dietrich will have appeared in her last American picture for some time, Song of Songs, directed by Mamoulian, the brilliant young Armenian. There was much dissent before the filming. Dietrich didn't have Sternberg and the two were like Damon and Pythias on the " lot." There was a harmony between director and star that Dietrich, for one, didn't like to see broken. But the movie moguls compromised and supplanted Fredric March with Brian Aherne (at Miss Dietrich's request) and work went on. The film promises to be among the most interesting of the year. (Buchowetzki filmed this old Sudermann story years ago with Pola Negri. They called it Lily of the Dust, then. Maybe, the movies have grown up since then . . ) But all American movie news pales into insignificance with the report that Eisenstein's great sociological film of Mexico has been cut down to some 8,000 feet by Sol Lesser, a distributor of vapidly popular " travel " films, and will be released with a musical score by Hugo Reisenfeld as not very much more than a scenic ! Que Viva Mexico ! Eisenstein has called his film. Thunder Over Mexico Sol Lesser is calling his version. There you have the difference — one1 an affirmation of life— the other its denial .... H. G. Weinburg. BOOK REVIEWS City Without A Heart, Anon. (Heinemann 7/6). We feel that part of the philosophers flurry arises because he is attempting to frame profound thoughts with a vocabulary made current in everyday use. For instance" the solipsist says that green is not a property of the leaf but a sensation which we experience on looking at the leaf. Remove all the sense impressions, says the solipsist, and nothing of the object will remain. But doesn't he really mean that he hasn't a word for what remains ? Wouldn't a writer, who was also a creator of language like James Joyce or Theo Rutra or A. Lincoln Gillespie, Jnr., be able to invent the word in an inspiration flash and save all the discussion ? Anyway, our novelists have not invented the words for the white centre core of Hollywood. City Without A Heart makes fun of the Hollywood film magnates but uses their own lingo to do so ! O. B. Death While Swimming. By Oswell Blakeston, with illustrations by Len Lye. (Bhat. 61, Southwark Park Road, London, S.E.16. 2/-.) Blakeston is so professionally elusive that there is excuse if his book of poems is taken as document. Because you may escape from words, but less often from rhythm, which accompanies unnoticed and trailing round oblivious ankles. This detective work one cannot pretend to be criticism