close up - Monoskop

4 CLOSE UP
documents which offer the contemporary reader an extensive tour of the ardent debates
about cinema as it emerged as an aesthetic form. 10 The arguments contained in the pages
of Close Up demonstrate, above all, that writing about cinema played a significant role in
the struggle to maintain alternatives to, and to resist solidification of, a too-rigidly fixed
institution. As the 1929 advertisement shown on page 24 attests, the editors of Close Up
resisted the ephemeral qualities of the cinema itself and provided instead a written
fixative, a textual archive of the cinema at a critical age:
Bound volumes of Close Up are collectors' books, and should be in the
possession of all followers of the cinema. With much that is exclusive and
unobtainable elsewhere, they will be undoubtedly of the greatest value as
REFERENCE BOOKS FOR THE FUTURE
as well as for the present. The theory and analysis constitutes the most valuable
documentation of cinematographic development that has yet been made. 11
'Reference books for the future'
Yet the texts published in Close Up have eluded the historian's need to easily classify,
ground and identify them; to locate their importance as anything more than a secondary
source. Because the writing in Close Up crosses many borders - between literary prose
and theoretical writing, between avant-garde manifesto and journalistic feuilleton, between
film production and literary modernism - it effectively overruns the canonical boundaries
of disciplinary republics. Perhaps this very debor'dement explains why Close Up has not
been more widely understood as a significant site of discourse about the cinema. 12
The writing in Close Up inhabited the same cultural moment as other texts that have
had a more indelible influence on contemporary film histories and theories. The
theoretical writing of Soviet film-makers, the speculations on film and photography by
practitioners of the German kulturkritik and later the writings of French film critics and
theorists have dominated the major accounts of cinema's first fifty years. 13 The years of
Close Up's publication - 1927-33 - define its own period as a 'critical age', situated
symmetrically on the brink of two decades; at the threshold, as well, between silent
cinema and the sound film. Close Up commenced publication in 1927, the year that
Siegfried Kracauer wrote the essays 'The Mass Ornament' and 'Photography' and that
Walter Benjamin began his project on the Paris Arcades. 14 It ended in 1933 as the Weimar
Republic was on the wane, a month before Hitler came to power. An examination of the
texts in Close Up illustrates the uncertainty about cinema's future at a moment when, as
Annette Michelson has suggested, alternatives were posed as a 'spectrum, rather than a
polarity of possibilities'. 15
Since the mid-1980s, as the writing of film history has taken a more Foucauldian bent,
scholars have begun to examine writing about cinema as a primary source - discursive
documents that impart their own form of historical knowledge. }6 Close Up provides an
exemplary archaeological site for the aesthetic, economic, ideological and technological
questions posed to a cinema struggling to form itself. In its pages, the theoretical writings
of Sergei Eisenstein were translated into English for the first time, the psychoanalysts