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 #:
000358
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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334 CLOSE UP action was given into the hands of the artists — he wouldn't call them that, but directors — for recording. Logically then, if for recording after action, why not for shaping before action. If you say that is what Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Dovzhenko have worked for, you do not understand the essential difference which separates these workers from Pabst. Their film work has often been a party weapon. Pabst would forge a weapon which would create parties. His pacificism is almost religious. He cites Babel. " Where there was only one language, there were no wars. The film is the first universal language of comprehensible ideas." If one could group film development under two major heads, one could easily fall into the temptation to group the French pictures under Chaplinesque " art " and most of the Russian efforts as a development of the school of D. W. Griffith. Squarely between these two schools then, would lie the German film, perhaps with Swedish influence written all over it. It is this which makes Pabst's presence in America so much more hopeful than was Eisenstein's. We have always liked the German film worker, and there has seldom, if ever, been any suspicion of him. I think this will follow in the case of Pabst. He has not come upon us and stated what he will do and what he will not do. He will do what he can with what he is given, and he will go on from there. To a very great idealism, Pabst adds the necessary modicum of patient practicality.