close up - Monoskop

viii
PREFACE
In the January 1929 issue of Close Up, the frontispiece displays a photograph of
Eisenstein inscribed: 'To K. Macpherson - Editor of the Closest Up to what cinema
should be.' This tribute marked the beginning of a relationship which was as much
writer to editor as it was master to student. Close Up published nine translations
of Eisenstein's writing between May 1929 and June 1933, in addition to a number of
occasional pieces about him and his work. 2 Given the constraints of space, we have
reluctantly decided that republishing Eisenstein's work must take a lower priority than
retrieving less well-known writing. To get a true sense of both the range of writing in
Close Up and the strength of its commitment to Eisenstein's ideas, our selection should
be read in conjunction with the work to be found in Film Form, The Film Sense and
Eisenstein's Selected Writings. 3
The writings of H.D. and Dorothy Richardson are presented in the third and fourth
parts of the book. The majority of H.D.'s contributions are included: her three-part
article on 'The Cinema and the Classics', published between July and November 1927,
and five other articles, although not the poem Projector, published in two parts in July and
October 1927. This is available in her Collected Poems. 4 We have included all Richardson's
'Continuous Performance' columns. We believe that they offer an account of the novelty
and modernity of the experience of cinema which is comparable in its scope to the
pioneering essays being written by Siegfried Kracauer in the same period, and which also
prefigures in intriguing and suggestive ways recent scholarship on cinema and
modernity. 5
The major piece in Part 5 is H.D.'s long essay on the film Borderline (1930), written
and directed by Macpherson and featuring H.D. and Bryher as well as Paul and Eslanda
Robeson among its cast. This was not published in Close Up, but as a separate pamphlet
by Mercury Press. We have included it here not only as another example of H.D.'s critical
writing but also because the film probably represented the ultimate expression of
Macpherson's interest in cinema and because, as a result, the fate of the journal was
intimately bound up with the critical response to the film.
Part 6 is devoted to Close Up articles on psychoanalysis and cinema. This work
represented a significant and imaginative departure in exploring the fascination and
possibilities of film. Part 7 illustrates how active Close Up was in attempting to create the
institutions and conditions necessary for a vibrant and radical 'film culture' (to use a term
from the 1970s). Far from being aloof, contributors like Bryher, Dorothy Richardson and
Ralph Bond energetically promoted amateur forms of production and exhibition, and
campaigned against the particularly hidebound censorship in the United Kingdom which
prevented many of the films they valued most highly from being screened.
Our selection represents only a fraction of the work published in Close Up, and quite
properly it reflects our tastes and priorities. We hope, however, that the collection will
contribute to today's debates about the cultural, aesthetic and social consequences of the
technological media in the first half of the twentieth century. It is intended less as an
exercise in the archaeology of film theory than as an attempt to provide a relevant
intellectual and historical context for those debates by showing how the issues were
experienced, imagined and discussed at the time.
This book, perhaps a little like Close Up, is itself the outcome of a three-way editorial
collaboration. When it emerged that Laura Marcus and James Donald in England and