Switzerland

Items in Collection

Close Up [Oct 1920 - Aug 1923]

Close Up [Oct 1920 - Sep 1923]

Close Up [Jan-Jun 1928]

Close Up [Jan-Jun 1929]

Close Up [Jul-Dec 1930]

Close Up [Jan-Jun 1930]

Close Up [Jul-Dec 1929]

Close Up [Mar-Dec 1932]

Close Up [Mar-Dec 1931]

Close Up [Mar-Dec 1933]

Close Up [Jul-Nov 1927]

Close Up [Jul-Dec 1928]

Switzerland

By Eric Hoyt

As an active film magazine, Close Up lasted only a short time, from 1927 to 1933. Yet the legacy of this English-language periodical, 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