Close Up was the first English-language journal of film theory. Published between 1927 and 1933, it billed itself as the only magazine devoted to film as an art, promising readers theory and analysis: no gossip. The journal was edited by the writer and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, the novelist Winifred Bryher, and the poet H. D., and it attracted contributions from such major figures as Dorothy Richardson, Sergei Eisenstein, and Man Ray. This anthology presents some of the liveliest and most important articles from the publication's short but influential history.
The writing in Close Up was theoretically astute, politically incisive, open to emerging ideas from psychoanalysis, passionately committed to pure cinema, and deeply critical of Hollywood and its European imitators. The articles collected here cover such subjects as women and film, The Negro in Cinema, Russian and working-class cinema, and developments in film technology, including the much debated addition of sound. The contributors are a cosmopolitan cast, reflecting the journal's commitment to internationalism; Close Up was published from Switzerland, printed in England and France, and distributed in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and Los Angeles. The editors of this volume present a substantial introduction and commentaries on the articles that set Close Up in historical and intellectual context. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in the origins of film theory and the relationship between cinema and modernism.
About the Author: James Donald, a former editor of the journals Screen Education and New Formations, is Professor of Media at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Anne Friedberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern.
Laura Marcus lectures in English and the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her most recent book is a study of Virginia Woolf.
