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 #:
000333
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Switzerland, Global Cinema, 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:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP Vol. X. No. 4 December, 1933 TURKISH PRELUDE By Marie Seton. Hollywood mania, like mass hysteria is easy to account for but difficult to control ; countries at every stage of civilization are potential victims and the more recent the Westernization the more virulent is the attack. The worst element in this Hollywood scourge is that either it pushes the impetus of smaller and younger nations to create their own cinema aside, or, else, forces them by competition and example into its own imbecile crudity, for it is the worst, and not the best, examples of American movie that are exported to Eastern Europe and Asia. It is tragic-comic to see the Indian film magazines imitating the quick fire snappiness of America's movie papers, and find their own Americanized love lyrics advertised in the " Supreme ! Romantic ! Thrills ! " jargon. It is the same in the Balkans, though everyone of the Near Eastern countries are fitted to develop their own native industry when they can escape the deadening influence of Ballyhoo. Turkey, though freed from Capitulations and any undue interference from foreigners is yet being led by the nose by Hollywood. Fox, for instance, is scheduled to place twenty of their " year's greatest love story " products in the ninety cinemas throughout Turkey, while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount keep competing representatives sipping coffee in spacious offices on the Grand rue de Pera. Fairbank's old silent, The Thief of Bagdad, can draw not inconsiderable audiences in Istanbul in the middle of the broiling summer, while on the other side of the Grand Rue Pabst's delicious Opera de Quart' Sous is shown to a handful of urchins, bored Turkish matrons and myself. If Turkey was a barren country without a studio, or potential filmic material in her own life and her post-Kemal Pasha history, then one would resignedly accept the inevitable as one must in the case of Roumania. But, Turkey has entered upon a new consciousness under Kemal Pasha, freed her women, abolished the fez, symbol of the old Turkish servitude, curtailed the 309