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 #:
000284
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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266 CLOSE UP Lot in Sodom." "LOT IN SODOM" By Herman G. Weinberg In an era of sound and talking films when even the most experimental of ■our producers and cineasts — Pabst, Ruttman, Fischinger, Rene Clair and a host of others — have produced exclusively for the film senere, and have achieved a katharsis between sight and sound hitherto unrevealed in the cinema, I have the courage, nay temerity, to review a sound film as a silent one. The film is Lot In Sodom, the creators are Watson and Webber, those amazingly skilful cineasts who previously produced Poe's Fall of the House of Ussher, and their new work is some thirty minutes of wondrous luminous pictures made fluid and malleable in the creative imagination. The sound apparatus was not available at the moment when this film was privately screened for me in the i\mateur Cinema League offices, through whose courtesy I was allowed to view it. A Mr. Louis Siegel did the score, on which I hope for an opportunity to comment later. But the Close-Up deadline had to be made. . . . Beginning with the synthesis of Sodom, wickedest of mortal cities, we are shown the orgies of the sodomites — semi-nude young men, fair of countenance