close up - Monoskop

ENTHUSIASMS AND EXECRATIONS 33
compartmentalization of cinematic modes evident by 1930 suggests that the aesthetic
moment of Close Up was probably over before the magazine ceased publication. 12
The 'Negro viewpoint' [JD/LM]
Despite their passion for the specificity of film and for the experience of watching
film, the contributors to Close Up were neither ignorant of, nor uninterested in, the
social power of cinema. One striking instance of this, particularly in the early years,
was a concern with the question of race, which led to the special issue on 'the negro'
and cinema in August 1929. Macpherson's editorial on the topic remains shocking: at
moments penetrating in its perceptiveness, but trapped within a racialized discourse
characteristic of the time.
'Effort at universal cinema', runs Macpherson's opening salvo, 'has well shown that
the only approach to it is strictly racial cinema.' By that he does not mean racist
cinema. That he is genuinely and profoundly opposed to:
Confronted with an instability (his own) which he calls a Race Problem, the
white man is always going to portray the negro as he likes to see him, no matter
how benevolently. Benevolence, indeed, is the danger. Apart from being the
most tricky and unkind form of human selfishness, it is often more than
humbug and always less than seeing, and does to sugar coat much that is not, so
to speak, edible. 13
What is Macpherson's alternative? In a prescient reading, he sees a hint of a different
cinema in a subversive edge to the comic actor Stepin Fetchit, often denounced in
later years as no more than a stereotype. But that disturbance is identified in terms
which reiterate the way that 'blackness' was being celebrated by many white
avant-garde artists. It is found in a certain physicality, a certain naturalness, and
ultimately that primitiveness necessary for a modernist aesthetic's challenge to the
suffocating reality of bourgeois life and the banal conventions of middlebrow art:
watch [Stepin Fetchit] move and you will see what we mean. There is more than
promise in the jungle, lissom lankness that slams down something unanswerable
in front of what we let go past as beauty. This splendour of being is one good
key to open a good many doors, all the way to our goal simply. ... Fetchit waves
loose racial hands and they, like life, touch everything that the world contains.
They are startling with what nobody meant to put into them, but which is all
too there - histories, sagas, dynasties, Keatsian edges off things make a voiceless
trouble back of the eye and the recording mind. Only afterwards you are really
beset by them. They are not Fetchit's hands, they are the big step we have
not yet taken. First of all these so utterly not incantationish gestures are
unselfconsciousness, perfectly inherited greatness of race and of race mind. It
only begins there. We can scrap every trained toe waggle of a ballerina for the
very least of these movements. Making this greatness articulate for the cinema is
the fascinating pioneer work of somebody. 14