CLOSE UP (1927–1933)

Anne Friedberg

A NEW FORM OF FILM WRITING

(…) From the beginning of its publication, the writers for Close Up were determined to transform the cultural topography of the cinema and its future. To do so, they were invested in the power of writing about film, enlisting it as a discursive midwife to aid in the development of the cinema’s potential. Certainly, as Christian Metz would later point out, the writer about cinema—the critic, the historian, the theoretician—is inextricably bound by the same desires and intentions that move film-makers and film spectators alike: “to maintain a good object relation with as many films as possible, and at any rate with the cinema as such” (1). In these terms, Metz warned, writing about the cinema is always in danger of having the discourse about its object swallowed up by the discourse of its object. Popular film criticism, academic film histories and—perhaps especially—the philosophical tracts of film theory may each have very separate audiences and agendas, but they all function—Metz argued—to imitate or prolong the cinema’s imaginary effects. Close Up writers reversed this discursive formula. Instead of using writing to extend the cinema’s effect, they advocated a cinema that mirrored the aesthetics and production of their own written discourse: discourse about the object, artfully designed, psychologically astute, independently financed, free from commercial constraints.

Close Up writers hoped that writing which contested the commercial illusionism of the “Hollywood code” (2) would create a cinema whose imaginary effects they could determine a priori. Close Up first appeared in July 1927: a handsomely printed, plainly bound journal in a distinctive pumpkin- coloured wrapper. The first covers were minimal: the words CLOSE UP were bannered simply across the top, the month and year discreetly placed in the lower left, the price in the lower right. Each issue was wrapped in a three-inch white paper band with more descriptive text: “CLOSE UP, an English review, is the first to approach films from the angles of art, experiment and possibility.” The wrapper was changed monthly to announce the key mottoes of the journal:

– “WE WANT BETTER FILMS!!!”

– “The Official Guide To Better Movies!—With illustrations from the best films—TECHNICAL. FRIENDLY. INFORMATIVE.”

– “The Only Magazine Devoted to Films As An Art— Interesting and Exclusive Illustrations. THEORY AND ANALYSIS—NO GOSSIP.”

Close Up became the model for a certain type of writing about film—writing that was theoretically astute, politically incisive, critical of films that were simply “entertainment”. For six and a half years, Close Up maintained a forum for a broad variety of ideas about the cinema; it never advocated a single direction of development, but rather posed alternatives to existing modes of production, consumption and film style.

In retrospect, the body of writing in Close Up appears as its own form of “literary montage”—a serial project with the random architecture of juxtaposition, an exhibit of documents which offer the contemporary reader an extensive tour of the ardent debates about cinema as it emerged as an aesthetic form. (3) The arguments contained in the pages of Close Up demonstrate, above all, that writing about cinema played a significant role in the struggle to maintain alternatives to, and to resist solidification of, a too-rigidly fixed institution. As the 1929 advertisement shown on page 24 attests, the editors of Close Up resisted the ephemeral qualities of the cinema itself and provided instead a written fixative, a textual archive of the cinema at a critical age:

“Bound volumes of Close Up are collectors’ books, and should be in the possession of all followers of the cinema. With much that is exclusive and unobtainable elsewhere, they will be undoubtedly of the greatest value as REFERENCE BOOKS FOR THE FUTURE As well as for the present. The theory and analysis constitutes the most valuable documentation of cinematographic development that has yet been made.” (4)

REFERENCE BOOKS FOR THE FUTURE

Yet the texts published in Close Up have eluded the historian’s need to easily classify, ground and identify them; to locate their importance as anything more than a secondary source. Because the writing in Close Up crosses many borders—between literary prose and theoretical writing, between avant-garde manifesto and journalistic feuilleton, between film production and literary modernism—it effectively overruns the canonical boundaries of disciplinary republics. Perhaps this very débordement explains why Close Up has not been more widely understood as a significant site of discourse about the cinema. (5)

Since the mid-1980s, as the writing of film history has taken a more Foucauldian bent, scholars have begun to examine writing about cinema as a primary source—discursive documents that impart their own form of historical knowledge.(6) Close Up provides an exemplary archaeological site for the aesthetic, economic, ideological and technological questions posed to a cinema struggling to form itself. In its pages, the theoretical writings of Sergei Eisenstein were translated into English for the first time, the psychoanalysts 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 ciné-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 of film theory”—the recovery of film theory’s own history—was a priority for film theorists of the 1970s and 1980s and would have to await the efforts of theoretically bent film historians.(7)

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.

(1) Metz relied on Melanie Klein’s description of the phantasy relation—an “object relation”—between infant and mother when oral drives are split into loving and destructive ones; constituting a “bad object” as a projection of hate and a “good object” as a projection of love. In cinema writers, Metz maintained, there is “an intention to establish, maintain or re-establish the cinema (or films) in the position of good object”. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, translated by Ben Brewster, Screen, 16, 2, p. 25, republished in: The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 9. Close Up created its own canon of “good objects”— the films of G.W. Pabst and Sergei Eisenstein— and maintained its “bad objects”—Hollywood and British cinema—in an effort to transform the cinema itself into an aesthetic form that would live up to its potentials and become a “good object.”

(2) In a two-part article entitled The Hollywood Code, Bryher indicted Hollywood values and the “code” of film-making which, by 1931, seemed apparent. See Bryher, The Hollywood Code I, in: Close Up, vol. VIII, no. 3, September 1931; The Hollywood Code II, in: Close Up, Vol. VIII, no. 4, December 1931.

(3) Walter Benjamin described the method for his Arcades Project—also begun in 1927: “Method of this work: literary montage. I need say nothing. Only show …to carry the montage principle into history.” See Walter Benjamin, [Theoretics of Knowledge: Theory of Progress], in: Philosophical Forum 15, 1–2, Autumn–Winter 1983–4, pp. 5–6. Certainly, the journal reader receives information serially, without carefully wrought design or novelistic devices to orchestrate or structure the reader’s response.

(4) Advertisement in the back of Close Up, vol. IV, no.5, May 1929.

(5) “If we are to approach (aborder) a text, it must have abord, an edge,” writes Jacques Derrida in an essay to which he selfconsciously appends a running strip of marginalia called “Border Lines.” Derrida argues—in the full polysemy of eversliding signifiers—that a text is not simply a corpus enclosed in its own margins, but a debordment, overrunning its limits into some other network— an intertext, metatext, context. See Jacques Derrida, LIVING ON: Border Lines, in: Harold Bloom (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism, New York: Seabury Press, 1979, pp. 81, 83. The trope of “borderline” was a central image for the Close Up editors, entitling, as they did, their one feature film Borderline (POOL films, 1930).

(6) Foucault’s oft-cited dictum from Archaeology of Knowledge has become a touchstone for much of the new film history: “The document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself, unities, totalities, series, relations.” Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, pp, 6–7.

(7) Reflecting a more Foucauldian influence on film history and theory, the British film journal, Framework, edited by Donald Ranvaud, initiated a column entitled Towards an Archaeology of Film Theory in 1980. By the late 1980s, a new generation of film historians began to rewrite cinema history with theoretically inflected agendas. See, for example, Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI, 1990; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; Richard Abel, French Film Criticism and Theory 1907–1939. Volume 1: 1907–1929, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; French Film Criticism and Theory 1907–1939. Volume 2: 1929–1939, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. From: James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (ed.), Close Up 1927–1933. Cinema and Modernism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 3–7.