James Donald, Anne Friedberg & Laura Marcus (ed),
Close up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism.
London: Cassell, 1998.
ISBN 0691004625
256pp
US$19.95 (paper)
(Review copy received from Princeton University Press)
Uploaded 12 November 1999

In the generally dim panorama of British modernism the film magazine Close up shines like a beacon. It was the brain child of Kenneth Macpherson, a young man of independent means, not a little talent, and quite a lot of personal charm. Macpherson’s immediate circle included the imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the wealthy author and patron of the arts Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the name Bryher. These three were the editorial core of the magazine, and among its main contributors. Other contributors included Harry Potamkin, Oswell Blakeston, the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs, and the novelist Dorothy Richardson. The magazine was edited from where the editors lived, which for most of the time was Lausanne. It started life in 1927 as a monthly but (as is often the case with little magazines) its frequency diminished. It finally ceased publication in 1933. During its lifetime its avowed purpose was to revitalise film culture in Britain, which it hoped to do by alerting people to the possibility of a different idea of cinema from that held either by the intellectuals or the mass audience. Not surprisingly it had only very limited success in this aim; but it left behind a remarkable body of writing, a fascinating sample of which is reproduced in the book under review.

Close up‘s lack of impact on the mainstream of British film culture can be explained in part by the blatant marginality of the editors who had placed themselves in every sense at a distance from the worlds both of the film industry and of conventional opinion-forming. It could also be argued that it came at the wrong time. 1927, when it started publication was the year of the first successful commercial application of synchronized sound to film, a development deeply inimical to the kind of avant-garde and art cinema that Close up supported. 1933, when it folded was the year of Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany and Bryher in particular seems to have felt that dabbling in film culture was less important than doing what one could to stop Fascism. But to argue thus is to have the benefit of hindsight. At the time 1927 must have seemed quite a propitious moment to start a magazine whose scope was international even though its target was Britain. The international art cinema was at a peak. The British film industry was belatedly emerging from the shock imposed on it in the early 1920s by Hollywood competition. As for the coming of sound, there was no necessary reason why it should develop the way it did and it might well have gone in the direction prospected by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in their “Statement on sound” published in Close up itself. The rise of Nazism could have been predicted, but Close up was not alone in failing to draw the conclusion that hindsight makes so easy.

It is also the case that one of the interesting things about Close up was that it was not vacuously “avant-garde”. As Robert Herring put it in an article in April 1929, “I don’t see what the avant garde is in front of.” It is not that Close up didn’t wish to push forward the frontiers of film art, but it has the common sense to realise (at least some of the time) that declaring oneself to be the advance guard is not sufficient for the purpose. What would really constitute an avant-garde, as far as Close up was concerned, remained to be discovered.

One way in which the magazine was ahead of its time was in its support for “the Negro”. In this of course it was not unique. An interest in what came to be called negritude was fairly widespread in advanced circles in Europe in the 1920s but it became obscured when the focus of progressiveness moved elsewhere – into proletarian literature, or popular-frontism, or the Resistance, or engagement or any other of the sites into which history drove it, legitimately enough, to migrate. Close up’s commitment to (specifically) black American culture found its expression not only in the magazine but in the aptly titled film Borderline directed by Macpherson and featuring (besides Macpherson himself, Bryher and H.D.) Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda.

Borderline is a film which deserves to be better known. So too does Close up, which makes this new anthology very welcome. Personally I find the selection of texts too literary, with whole sections given over to contributions to the magazine by H.D. and Dorothy Richardson. Both are, of course, important writers but H.D.’s writing for the magazine varies between the inspired and the merely sloppy, while Richardson’s occupies a mid range which might charitably be described as “golden mediocrity” in the classical (approving) sense. Readers whose main interest is literature or feminism will no doubt want to contest this judgement and feel that their priorities are well served by the choice of texts. Where all readers are ill served (and particularly those whose background is not a film one) is in the matter of footnoting. The editors have diligently footnoted their own introductions to the sections into which the book is divided (one such introduction contains no fewer that 55 footnotes). But they have not supplied footnotes to help readers with some of the obscure references in Close up itself. For example there is a long (and wonderful) article by H.D. which discusses a film by L. Keleschow called Expiation or, in German, Sühne. The editor has correctly glossed Keleschow as Kuleshov, but has not identified the film, whose correct title is Po zakonu and is normally known in English as By the Law. Nor does the editor oblige with the name of its star, who is described in lyrical terms by H.D. and is indeed every bit as marvellous as H.D. says she is. She is Alexandra Khokhlova, and if the editors had done a proper job they would have told you.

These cavils apart, the Close up anthology can be highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the avant garde or film history or the history of women’s writing or any of the things with which this extraordinary magazine intersected.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith