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 #:
000296
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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278 CLOSE UP Victoria Price's testimony was merely a repetition of her first rape story, but was torn to pieces by Leibowitz who again and again proved her to be a liar. Yet, on this testimony, but more specifically to uphold the white prestige of the rotten south, Heywood Patterson was again sentenced to death. Immediate notice of appeal was given, and the trial was then and there stopped — all the other cases to follow suit in the result of this appeal. A month later, June, 1933, Judge Horton, the same judge who had passed death sentence, was forced into granting the appeal at the Alabama Supreme Court. This he did saying that the evidence preponderated greatly in favour of the accused. This is another partial victory, but there must be no illusions as to the intentions of the Alabama lynch courts. These intentions are that the boys shall die. That the judge is not favourable to the defence, as at first might seem, is made indisputably clear by the fact that he has refused to grant bail for the prisoners pending this new re-trial. And meanwhile ex-senator Heflin, an active Ku Klux Klan member, has offered his services to state prosecutor Knight and is whipping up the lynch spirit for the new trial set for October. Everyone knows that the boys are innocent, and that if they had been white they would have been freed long ago. State-law keeps the case in Alabama ; and yet it is in Roosevelt's power to order their release as it has been in the power of Governor Miller of Alabama to free them all along. Now a jail, in which five Negroes provenly having had no connection with the murder of a white girl in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, has been broken into and three of them have been lynched. This happened on August 13th just a few weeks before the coming re-trial. " We want no more Scottsboros " — that is the cry. No more Scottsboros . . . but already this year 20 cases of lynching. The Teague of Struggle for Negro Rights who sends these figures says they are far beneath the truth ; many lynchings and murders of Negroes never get into the press, are hushed up, not officially noticed, can't be traced. But they will not kill the spirit of the Negroes which is becoming more militant as the terror increases. And as token of this, as token of the fortitude of the Scottsboro boys in the unspeakable tortures of 1\ years in the death cells of Gadsden, Kilby, Birmingham, beaten by the wardens, made to witness executions, told " it's your turn next " while the electric chair was dragged at intervals in front of their cells, witness Roy Wright, the child of 13 ... " they offered him 500 dollars to turn state evidence and say the other boys had committed the rape, but he refused — so they knocked out two of his teeth." Nancy Cunard.