close up - Monoskop

30 CLOSE UP
and aesthetic possibilities of film as a medium was certainly close to the heart of Close
Up. Macpherson, Bryher and their colleagues had not yet given up hope that film art
could be achieved in the context of commercial cinema: witness their enthusiasm for
Pabst's work at Ufa, Harry A. Potamkin's defence of directors like Abel Gance and
Jean Epstein, working on the margins of the French industry, and H.D.'s articles on
Conrad Veidt and Joyless Street. Close Up also publicized the cinematic experiments of
established artists - Man Ray's Emak Bakia, for example. It documented not only the
work of the French Surrealists but also the lesser-known and more diffuse activities of
independents like the Belgians Charles Dekeukeleire and Gussy Lauwson.
Enthusiasm for the idea of 'cine-poems' led the magazine to champion major
individual figures working outside the cinema industry. The Swede Viking Eggeling,
the Germans Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman and the English-based New
Zealander Len Lye were all devoted at this time to creating the abstract or 'absolute'
film. Close Up was committed to the establishment of an independent production and
distribution sector, distinct from the mainstream of commercial cinema, 4 and they
enthusiastically reported the setting up of avant-garde production groups like
Cavalcanti's 'Neo-films' in Paris and Herman Weinberg and Robert van Rosen's
'Excentric Films' in New York. 5
All this varied work pushed at the edges of the medium. Before the talkies, there
did exist, however marginally, a dynamic and fractious sphere of production and
exhibition in which the ontology of cinema could be investigated and expanded. Close
Up existed in part to provide a forum for the critical debate about this kind of film.
But, according to Wollen at least, this was not the only type of avant-garde film being
produced. In his article, he identified this alternative tradition as those film-makers
whose aim was to expand and exploit the analytic or epistemological power of cinema:
'On the other hand, there were the Russian directors, whose films were clearly
avant-garde, but in a different sense: Eisenstein's Strike, Dovzhenko's Zvenigora,
Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. H
Wollen's polemical opposition reflects the dominant avant-garde aesthetic of the
1970s. Perhaps it was always too stark. It is easy enough to carve up the variations and
oppositions between different strands of avant-garde film-making in the 1920s in
other ways: the search for specificity through abstraction versus the more figurative
and lyrical work of the French modernists; those same modernists versus the
Surrealists who denounced Germain Dulac's filming of Artaud's script for The
Sea-shell and the Clergyman', the attempt to capture the commercial industry for art
versus the creation of purist enclaves; and so forth. Nevertheless, Wollen's two
traditions do provide a useful context for reading Close Up.
The range and diversity of the journal's enthusiasms give a sense of dynamic
possibilities for a cinema which had not yet congealed into the constraining categories
of film history (and niche marketing): entertainment cinema, art cinema, avant-garde
cinema. But Wollen's meditations on what constitutes an avant-garde make it possible
to discern the dominant critical tendency in Close Up. This is perhaps, paradoxically,
most clear in Macpherson's introductions to Eisenstein's article 'The Fourth
Dimension in the Kino' in March 1930. There, it is not the power of montage to
decompose familiar perceptions of the world, to create a new and more analytical way