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 #:
000292
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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274 CLOSE UP The nine innocent Scottsboro boys when arrezted. SCOTTSBORO Some of the readers of Close Up may have seen Cabin in the Cotton, a film shown in London, all too briefly, last March. It was the story of the struggle between the white planters, the masters, and the " poor whites," the agricultural workers in the southern states of America. Starvation and wage-cuts drove the workers to organise themselves to protest for the right to live. In the course of the film a lynching took place. The worker was hunted with bloodhounds, lynched in a swamp. A film, yes — But these very things are happening all the time in America. And brutally atrocious as they are for white workers they are worse for the Negroes. What has tightened up all the screws in these murders and frame-ups of Negroes so that not a week goes by without new manifestations of this vicious race-hatred ? Two things. Firstly, the white labourers are beginning to see that their lives are bound up with the miseries of their black neighbours, and that they themselves are no better off. The " white superiority " (instilled since slavery ceased as a name but not as an ever progressively worse economic bondage) is growing threadbare. The white working-class is beginning to get together with the black, beginning to protect the Negroes that are shot down by sheriffs and posses for resisting evictions (as happened with the Tallapoosa share-croppers last December) . White land-lords and authorities are afraid of this increasing sympathy between poor whites and black peasants ; they want to put a stop to it. The second factor is the immense publicity and outcry about the scandalous legal conduct of the Scottsboro case.