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 #:
000275
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 257 montage as well. It was agreed that Mr. Eisenstein would notify me in due time in order that I may go to the United States, view and officially approve the film before it is shown to the public. With enormous surprise I now learn that Eisenstein's film on Mexico, the very one upon which my prestige and credit with my country's government are involved, is being publicly exhibited in the United States. As I cannot approve the said exhibition, for I neither know in which way the film was finished, nor even the name of the person who performed the cutting or of the one who authorized its showing, I beg of you, Sir, to let the public know through the columns of your magazine, that I decline all responsibility for the picture that is being exhibited under the title Thunder Over Mexico, directed by Eisenstein and that I do not consider myself to be involved in a project which might injure the artistic prestige which gave me a sufficient measure of my government's trust as to be appointed in this case its official representative as well as, subsequently to the membership of the Committee selected for the formulation of the laws and regulations for the exhibition and exportation of Mexican made films as well as the importation of foreign pictures. I am taking the necessary steps with my government for relieving me, in view of the foregone facts, of all responsibility in the making of the Eisenstein film, at the same time informing it of my formal disapproval of the parts of the film, in the making of which I had no participation, as well as of the film's cutting and montage. — Very truly yours, Adolfo Best Maugard, Mexico City. " Deserter." V. I. Pudovkin.