close up - Monoskop

80 CLOSE UP
as a material and as a set of technical procedures, was inserted into the already
constituted system of the classical Hollywood style.' 2
Although technological and above all economic factors determined the nature and
speed of the switch to sound, the change did have far-reaching aesthetic and cultural
implications. Close Up remains important not least because it provided the forum for
a debate about those aspects of sound, one which initially became the focus for what
Ian Christie has called - perhaps too one-sidedly - a 'rearguard defence of the
aesthetics of silent art cinema'. 3 Here, the issue was less what sound would do to or
for Hollywood, than what it meant for the search for pure cinema. This became one
context in which Soviet film-makers, with their emphasis on montage rather than
theatrical narrative, were promoted by the magazines, as this comment from
Macpherson illustrates: 'We are able to safely feel that the future of pure cinema is
safe in [Soviet filmmakers'] hands, that the excrescent and reactionary strivings of
talking and talking colour films need not unduly disturb us.' 4 Here is Macpherson
again in July 1929, still aggressively hostile:
The artists wait and wait. World sales, markets, exploitation, profits were
hedging them in, closing them round, herding them, reducing and reducing
their opportunity and scope, until, one by one, Sweden, Germany, France, went
deeper and deeper to waste, leaving only Russia, firm in her beliefs but shaken
financially and sounding the markets of the world for possible sales. The
impregnable Eisenstein going and going to Hollywood. Pudovkin leading a role
in a wholly callow and fatuous German film. Feelers ... indications ... premise.
Quiet erosion everywhere. Then, like a monstrous tidal wave, the onrush of the
talkie. Quiet erosion now a rapid crash and fall of land. Back ten, back fifteen
years. Back to Sonny Boy and Mammie Mine and Don't Go Down the Mine,
Daddie. Back to proscenium front. Back unashamedly to Little Dorrit and East
Lynne. Back to a hundred thousand Dancing Daughters, back to the bootlegger
and the thug. Back to Bella Donna and Mary Dugan. Back to Methusalah. Back,
in short, to front! 5
All the attempts at articulating the specificity of film as medium seemed to
Macpherson to be threatened by the imposition of theatrical norms: 'rehash of
Somerset Maugham, of Frederick Lonsdale, of Michael Arlen, of theatre names we
had, not out of reason, expected to hear no more'. 5 This return to theatricality is also
identified as the great danger when in October 1928 Close Up published the famous
'Statement on sound' by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, Eisenstein's
assistant on Strike and Potemkin and co-director and co-scenarist on October and Old
and New. The probable consequence of sound, the Soviet film-makers predict, will be
'an epoch of automatic utilisation for "high cultural dramas" and other photographic
performances of a theatrical nature'. 6 Again, it is not synchronized sound as such
which is seen as the problem, but what Ernest Betts in his contribution calls 'the
picture of synchronised speech'. 7
In fact, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov acknowledged that the major problem
they really faced was the technical backwardness which prevented them from
exploring ways of incorporating sound as an element of montage (or 'mounting' as it