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 #:
000256
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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238 CLOSE UP nor the productions are wholly to blame — but the whole system . . . There is Duvivier, who has given us this season three good pictures. I mentioned already his Alio Paris : Ici Berlin. His second picture, Poil de Carotte, had a few valuable things in it, but as a whole was a little too sentimental and too tearful. In spite of all this, it was one of the very few good pictures of this poor season. His third, La Tete d'un Homme, taken from a novel by Georges Simenon, a sort of French Edgar Wallace, was an excellent picture. The adaptation done by a young French scenarist, Louis Delapree, was splendid, and Duvivier who knows how to direct, used his actors, Inkijinoff (of Storm over Asia), Harry Baur and Rignault in the most competent way. It is a film with perfect rhythm, and, except for the last ten minutes, an intelligently told story of a mysterious crime. Duvivier is the only real bright spot in this year of cinematic disgrace. He is still young, doesn't speak of himself as a genius, and has worked continuously for more than 13 years without telling journalists most of the time what's wrong with the movies, gives credit to all his collaborators, without making a pose of it. Do you understand why I think that he is a most sympathetic director ? There is, of course, also Rene Clair. His position is somewhat special. Abroad he is recognized as the best French director, but in France he still has to fight. Result : 14 Juillet, a weak story and the most competent work done in a French studio. But we want him to direct a really good story, which his producers won't accept. He is going — it appears — to direct his next picture for London Films, the A. Korda company in London. Will Alexander Korda be intelligent enough to let Rene Clair direct a good picture, a human story ? Maurice Tourneur, perhaps the best craftsman in French movies, disappointed us completely this year with a bad, old-fashioned melodrama, Les Deux Orphelines and has just finished two short pictures. In spite of the enthusiastic publicity, this fact clearly indicates the bad standard of French movie politics. One of the most able directors confined to inferior work ' Picture a man like Sternberg, Vidor, Mervyn Le Roy, or Stroheim, doing shorts in Hollywood. I am quite sure that even the dangerous nit-wits of Hollywood wouldn't dream of wasting their good directors on such an inferior job. Epstein, who hasn't worked much since arrival of the talkies, had to direct L'Homme a L'Hispano, already done in a silent version, and the material is still as bad as it was then. L'Herbier, who has produced (as he knows) a few quite bad talkies, is now shooting L'Epervier from a play by Francis de Croisset. It remains to be seen whether that picture will restore the good opinion we had of him when he was making silent films. Gremillon who directed La Petite Lise, one of the strongest pictures produced in the early days of the talkies, hasn't since then done anything worth