close up - Monoskop

ENTHUSIASMS AND EXKCRATIONS 31
of seeing and understanding, nor the possible exploitation of the pedagogy of cinema
for political ends that Macpherson is concerned with - as, say, Walter Benjamin might
have been. Macpherson is exclusively concerned with the implications of Eisenstein's
'new art of tone-film' for a phenomenology of skilled spectatorship. Bearing in mind
his slogan in his first editorial - 'The film for the film's sake' - one might almost say
that this is Eisenstein reread through Pater. Macpherson quotes at length from Hanns
Sachs's article 'Film Psychology'. 7 His own conclusion focuses on the aesthetic
possibilities of the overtones created for the spectator through montage:
'See' is inaccurate. 'Hear' is inaccurate. 'See and hear' is inaccurate. Sense, says
Eisenstein, is the clue to overtone or fourth dimension. I sense - vividly, faintly,
overwhelmingly, not at all. I sense must mean I re-organise, I resound. To see
means little, means nothing, unless it is a process of absorption and creation.
You need only walk round a picture gallery to know this, or to go to the opera,
and realise the moment when you react no more to what you are seeing or what
you are hearing, though, while you remain there, you will continue to see or to
hear. With this saturation point, comes the cessation of creative energy that
makes appreciation and assimilation. 'I sense' (I resound) is, therefore the
paramount consideration and subject to almost no restriction. Psychicphysiological
experience, conscious and unconscious, active and passive,
symbolic and 'realistic', is a source of infinite supply, and authentic on almost
any plane of organised, scientific selection. The new overtone montage will
avoid saturation. It will stimulate and provoke, thwart and incite, until response
is absolute. 8 [italics original]
The same concern with the power of the cinematic image to transform the objects it
represents and to create a unique aesthetic experience for the film spectator can be
found in Robert Herring's account of 'magic' in cinema. Its source, whether conscious
or not, is identified in Harry A. Potamkin's discussion of French cinema when he
refers in passing, and slightly dismissively, to the term photogenie. This was developed
by the impressionist, or modernist, film-makers working in France in the 1920s, and
has generally been abandoned as irredeemably bound up with a confused and
anti-theoretical mysticism. In 1981, however, in Afterimage, a journal that in its own
way reworked Close Up's commitment to radical formal experimentation in film, Paul
Willemen offered a limited defence of the term:
As the 'law of the cinema', [photogenie] clearly sets in place a viewer's aesthetic.
The defining characteristic of cinema is said to be something that pertains to the
relationship between viewer and image, a momentary flash of recognition or a
moment when the look at... something suddenly flares up with a particularly
affective, emotional intensity. The founding aspect of cinematic quality, instead
of its specificity, is located, not in the recognition of an artistic sensibility or
intentionality 'behind' the screen, as it were, but in the particular relationship
supported or constituted by the spectatorial look, between projected image and
viewer. As such photogenie is a term mobilised to demarcate one set of viewers -
those able to 'see' - from others. In this context it functions like a mark of