close up - Monoskop

50 CLOSE UP
advancement indicated by Miss Loos. In addition to this, since, doubtless, most Close
Up readers have a clear conception of how pictures should be made, or, more likely
still, a picture in mind which they have never dared to think might ever be made
because of the present fabled costs of production, they will certainly find this final
sentence full of promise of achievement.
Vol. IV, no. 4 April 1929
Robert Herring
A NEW CINEMA, MAGIC AND
THE AVANT GARDE
We cannot approach to a new cinema unless we understand what is at the bottom of
cinema; I try to think that must be a platitude, but I look round and I am forced to
believe it isn't, forced by what I see going on and by the bright plans for going on in a
just as old and only slightly different way. So let it stand.
By 'new' I do not mean something wild and exotic and altogether inapplicable, but
a cinema that is the result of our realising what cinema is, or even of our trying to
realise it (that would be something). Such a cinema will be far enough away from all that
we have now, all that we put up with, to merit the term New Cinema. There hasn't
been much cinema yet, although men have been so busy making films for so long, and
there never will be unless the magic of it is realised, just as much as how to use a camera
(which isn't) and all the other facts. Magic is a fact itself, one of the hardest. Anything
that is real is magical; magic is the name for the thing that is larger than the thing itself,
and this larger thing is what makes it real. Another platitude.
I am not going to be called cranky and queer and generally unreliable because I
mention magic as part of the rock bottom of cinema. It's not a question of inexpert
blah and experimental enthusiasm. Aren't films just too wonderful and look what
you can do in them: I do not think it is very useful of M. Auriol to suggest 'Let us
conserve the world that exists on the screen as a heaven to which one might perhaps
attain - as late as possible, however so as not to risk losing it'. Shots do not matter very
much and gay reasoning about states of consciousness, my own as much as anyone
else's, is to be distrusted, by myself as much as anyone else. That is all right, as far as
it goes, but can't we really, good heavens, get any further? I think of Pyrenee motorists
burbling in the lower Basque villages about mountains while their radiator cools
down. Interval-chat. All right, perhaps, harmless, why not, still we know all about
that. Get on.
But we can't get on unless we keep a firm hold on magic. As that is our foundation, it
comes to keeping our feet on the ground. It is surprising that many prefer a tight-rope.
The more matter-of-fact you are, the more poetic can you really be. The best