close up - Monoskop

120 CLOSE UP
Tom Jones and the shop girl and the barber and the knife boy have sometimes felt
threatened with odd maladies. We want healing in blur of half tones and hypnotic
vibrant darkness. Too mechanical perfection would serve only I fear, to threaten that
world of half light. We hesitate to relinquish our old ideals and treasures, fearing we may
lose our touch with mystery by accepting this new (this sort of Euripidean
sophistication) in place of the old goat-herd and his ribald painted chorus.
Vol. I, no. 3 September 1927
CONRAD VEIDT
THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE
A small room, a stuffy atmosphere; a provincial Swiss lake-side cinema; the usual
shuffle and shuffle and the unaccustomed (to the urbane senses) rattle of paper bags.
Crumbs. 'Mile must not smoke here.' Of course I might have known that, I never
smoke in these places, what made me this time? Something has been touched before I
realise it, some hidden spring; there is something wrong with this film, with me, with
the weather, with something. The music ought, it is evident, be making my heart spring
but I don't like student songs and these Heidelbergish melodies especially leave me
frigid. There's something wrong and I have seen those horses making that idiotic turn
on the short grass at least eight times. What is it? I won't stay any longer. The music
ought to be all right - my slightly readjusted ears make that slight concession. I wish I
had stayed at home, or why didn't I go instead to that other little place, it's better
ventilated, across the way. And so on. This storm that doesn't break. I have no reaction
to anything ... O that's what the little man is after.
For I see now. There is a rhythm within the rhythm, there is a story within the story.
The little man (it is curiously he whom I personally met before in Joyless Street,
disguised now out of recognition) beckons at the top of a sandy hill. The little tree
twists and bends and makes all the frantic gestures of the little tree at the cross-roads
under which Faust conjured devils. That's it precisely. This has something behind it,
in it, through it. That little man means much more than that. He isn't an absurd little
obvious Punchinello. He is a symbol, an asterisk, an enigma. Spell the thing backwards,
he seems to be saying, spell it right side to or back side to or front or behind and you'll
see ... his little leer means something. The horses filing again, in obvious procession,
mean something. They are going to spell something, make a mystic symbol across short
grass, some double twist and knot and the world will go to bits ... something is going
to happen.
I have forgotten the paper bags. The music does fit in. I have forgotten the lilt and rise
and lilt and fall of the violin that doesn't in the least know that the piano is existing.
That's it exactly. The piano and the violin live in separate elements, so this and this. The