close up - Monoskop

INTRODUCTION 7
Hanns Sachs and Barbara Low debated the unconscious effects of cinematic
spectatorship, and a strong contingent of female literary modernists - H.D., Dorothy
Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore - began to write on cinema. The journal
also contained a range of speculations about film technology; promoted the alternative
distribution and exhibition networks of cine-clubs and film societies; addressed the
problems and potentials of a British cinema; campaigned against film censorship;
championed Soviet film-making and film theory; had a persistent critique of racism in the
cinema; and continually assessed the state of film theory and criticism. Many of the
critical and theoretical questions which troubled the contributors to Close Up between
1927 and 1933 returned, as if to haunt film writers and theorists, in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this regard, it is striking that the debates in Close Up were not strategically excavated;
interest in alternative exhibition and distribution, political questions about
representation, concerns about the economic domination of first-world national cinemas,
theorizations of the role of the spectator, psychoanalytic theories of the cinematic
apparatus and debates about censorship dominated the agenda of'contemporary' film
theory. 'The archaeology offilm theory' - the recovery offilm theory's own history - was
not a priority for film theorists of the 1970s and 1980s and would have to await the efforts
of theoretically bent film historians. 17
The writing in Close Up demonstrates how the cinema — grasped for its potentials,
feared for its foreclosures - transformed the very fabric of psychic, gendered and
racialized experience, and explored - against cinema's commercial domination — the
radical possibilities of film as a new medium of aesthetic expression. Introducing the texts
from Close Up now, in the late 1990s, prompts a reconsideration of a pivotal period in this
century's cultural history, of the existing accounts of film history and theory and of the
cinema's relation to literary and artistic modernism.
Until now, Close Up has predominantly been used as source material for histories of
national cinemas. Jay Leyda relied on Close Up as primary source material in his Kino: A
History of the Russian and Soviet Film, as did Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to
Hitler. Rachel Low, in her History of British Film 1918-1929, describes Close Up in
more detail than any other standard film history. She assesses its historical contribution
as 'very great despite its small circulation ... the Close Up writers addressed the
magazine and a few books to each other and a small circle of film initiates'. 19 While Low
identified many of the Close Up writers, she did not acknowledge the contribution of the
poet H.D. - a writer of key importance to the journal. 20 Yet Low uses H.D.'s prose in
uncredited quotations throughout the book to generalize about the style of writing in the
magazine: 'the characteristic style was affected, fashionable writing in an elliptical and
casual manner'. 21
In 1980, Don Macpherson's collection, Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the
Thirties, productively challenged the dominant histories of the period by pointedly
attacking the emphasis placed on the role of John Grierson and the GPO film unit, and
reclaiming a 'forgotten tradition' in British independent film production. 22 In his essay
for the volume, Deke Dusinberre describes the importance of Close Up as the 'focal point
for avant-garde film activity in Britain'. 23 Traditions of Independence was intended as a
historiographically rigorous counter-history, but it also inadvertently produced its own
historical counter-myth. The ardent anti-censorship campaign evident in Close Up before