close up - Monoskop

INTRODUCTION
Laura Marcus
I am now intensely interested [in film]... In fact am doing a little critical work for
a new very clever movie magazine, supposed to get hold of things, from a more or
less 'artistic' angle but not the highbrow attitude ... It is to be called, CLOSE-
UP, a splendid title I think ... I feel [film] is the living art, the thing that WILL
count but that is in danger now from comnerical [sic] and popular sources. 1
The film is the art of dream portrayal and perhaps when we say that we have
achieved the definition, the synthesis toward which we have been striving. 2
The eleven articles the poet and novelist H.D. wrote for Close Up appeared in the
journal's first two years; she made no written contribution after the December 1929
issue, apart from her pamphlet on the film Borderline, which was published separately,
and anonymously, by the Mercury Press in 1930. Her first three film articles appeared
under the title 'The Cinema and the Classics'. They are investigations and
celebrations of film art as a new classicism, of a 'beauty' wholly submerged by
Hollywood film, but revealed in the new German and Russian cinema (of Pabst,
Kuleshov, Eisenstein) which is the topic of a number of H.D.'s subsequent Close Up
articles. 'The problem of England and the beauty of England (psychically) is never
that of the Scandinavians, and technically at least it should learn and study not from
America but in and through the Germanic and Russian mediums,' wrote H.D. in her
article 'Russian Films'. 3 Pabst's Joyless Street, which she had seen in 1925, was her
cinematic touchstone, and Greta Garbo her image of a beauty destroyed when Garbo
left Europe for America.
A number of the tenets expressed in the 'Cinema and the Classics' pieces echo the
'imagist' aesthetics with which H.D.'s early poetry is associated - spareness,
directness, 'restraint' - as well as the 'Hellenism' which was a central aspect of her
poetics throughout her long writing career. 4 'True modernity approaches more and
more to classic standards,' she writes in 'Restraint':
The 'classic' as realism could be better portrayed by the simplest of expedients.
A pointed trireme prow nosing side ways into empty space, the edge of a quay,
blocks of solid masonry, squares and geometric design would simplify at the
same time emphasize the pure classic note. ... Beauty restrained and chaste, with
the over-weaving of semi-phosphorescent light, in a few tense moments showed
that the screen can rise to the ecstatic level of the poetic and religious ideals of
pure Sophoclean formula. 5