close up - Monoskop

PREFACE
The journal Close Up, edited by Kenneth Macpherson, the novelist Bryher and the poet
H.D., was published between 1927 and 1933. It represented a major attempt by a group of
literary intellectuals to assess, at a crucial moment of transition, the aesthetic possibilities
opened up by cinema within, despite and against its commercial contexts. The importance
of Close Up for histories of both modernism and cinema is being recognized more and
more widely, and so an anthology which makes even a sample of its work more easily
available is timely.
Our selection of material has been guided by a number of principles. First, we wanted
to show the range of issues and concerns that dominated the journal during its six years of
publication. Second, we have attempted to convey the lively and dynamic tone of the
magazine, and to give an impression of the type of cinema it promoted. Third, we have
included examples of the writing of all the regular contributors, with their various
enthusiasms and phobias, although we have generally concentrated on material that is not
easily accessible elsewhere. Fourth, however, there is an argument implicit in one quite
deliberate imbalance. We have placed a special emphasis on the writings of H.D. and
Dorothy Richardson. This is not only in recognition of their literary, and sometimes even
poetic, qualities. We want to give their speculations on film and cinema wider currency
primarily in order to pose the question whether literary modernism - and especially the
modernism of women like Virginia Woolf as well as the Close Up contributors - should be
seen in large part as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities
opened up by cinema.
The book is organized in the following way. The first part offers a cross-section of
articles, mostly by regular contributors. In a compressed way, it captures the flavour of
the polemic in Close Up and indicates some of the things it stood for: its enthusiasm for
'the film for the film's sake', its hostility towards mainstream Hollywood and British films
and its commitment to the 'Negro viewpoint' in cinema. The second part touches, all too
briefly, on one of the key topics of debate in Close Up: the coming of the talkies, or as it
was often seen, the decline and fall of the universal language promised by silent films. In
this section Sergei Eisenstein makes a fleeting appearance as joint author of a statement
on sound cinema with Pudovkin and Alexandrov.
Eisenstein's absence elsewhere needs some justification, as Close Up often figures in the
history of film theory as the conduit through which his ideas about film were introduced
into the West. Vladimir Petric, for example, in discussing the transmission of Soviet film
theory to an American context, concludes:
Not only did Close Up provide most Americans with an introduction to the many
theories and issues of Soviet cinematic theory, it also provided many American film
theorists with an audience for their essays and articles on Soviet filmmakers and
their work. 1