close up - Monoskop

INTRODUCTION 23
The letter also proposed a number of film projects suggested by Erno Metzner, to be
produced independently by Macpherson. Bryher continues: 'I think this is certainly the
way to work if you want to continue in films as Pabst says you should.'
Surely these letters might overstate Pabst's enthusiasm, but the daydream of
collaboration continued. In June 1932, Bryher writes from Berlin:
Pabst by terms of the new regime if enforced in July can never make another film in
Germany. He has been awarded the Legion d'Honneur and hopes to get a permit to
work in France. Metzner also must leave and hopes to go to Paris. It is much more
serious than even I ever thought, but I must not write of politics, I fear. I think there
is a chance for the English film, if only we could get people working in England. 78
When Pabst left for Paris in June 1932 and Sachs for Boston, Bryher returned to Territet.
In August, she wrote a series of letters to Macpherson that expressed an increasing sense
of ultimatum about his film projects: 'If you would like to make a film I feel that
commercially early autumn is the moment to do it. BUT I cannot push prod or pull you
through a film you only half want to make'. 79
Close Up concluded its journalistic coverage of Pabst's career with the hope that he
would succeed in Hollywood in 1933 where Eisenstein had not: Tabst's presence in
America [is] so much more hopeful than Eisenstein's. We have always liked the German
film worker, and there has seldom, if ever, been any suspicion of him. I think this will
follow in the case of Pabst.' 80 Pabst and Eisenstein were the two heroic - if theoretically
incommensurate - figures the Close Up writers thrust into their critical limelight.
Eisenstein's ambitions for intellectual montage and Pabst's acumen for psychological
realism were seen as separate — but critical - strategies to advancing the film as an art.
Theory/practice
While most of his editorials answer implied charges against the cinema, Macpherson was
fearful of an overly prescriptive theoretical practice. Despite the fact that the journal was
first promoted as providing 'theory and analysis', Macpherson became more and more
dubious of'film theory':
Sometimes we feel that writing about it all is like trying to tie a collar on it. It would
certainly be so if we said the cinema is this, cinema is that. The fact is what we are
really trying to do is open the gate and let it out over the hills with the rolling cloud
that critics will call composed or well constructed. 81
The more one dabbles in theory, the more mythical, evanescent and intangible does
theory become. Not in the sense of unattainable divinity, but in the sense of sheer
invalidity. Theory made too precise can only impoverish. ... Theory. Theory. There
is the theory that builds theory. And the theory that explodes theory. Remember,
your theory is more valid, more valuable to you than any you can borrow.
Remember, action came first, theory afterwards. 82
One of the reasons why I do not like 'film theory' text-book acquired, text-book
practised, text-book formulated, is that film theory cannot be learned that way. 83