In July 1927 a new film magazine arrived, pocket-sized, in a distinctive
burnt orange cover. This was Close Up, the idiosyncratic, maddening, invaluable
monthly edited by Kenneth Macpherson, and published in Switzerland by POOL, the
collective funded by Macpherson's wife, the writer Bryher (Winifred Ellerman).
Like The Film Society, Close Up became a focal point for British believers in
film art. Its reach was international. Correspondents kept track of productions
worldwide, illustrated with stills; advertisements came from Paris, Berlin and
New York. The stylistic breadth was equally wide. Experimental literary figures
were quickly welcomed: Gertrude Stein sent two pieces, as did the French
surrealist René Crevel. The novelist Dorothy Richardson wrote a regular column,
'Continuous Performance', exploring the complex interaction between film and
audience; she was also a key player in the magazine's crusade against film
censorship. Hardcore film theory played an increasing part: a ground-breaking
Soviet statement on film sound in October 1928 was followed by a series of
testing articles by Eisenstein ('The Fourth Dimension in the Kino', 'The Dynamic
Square', etc.), pored over by all art-conscious British technicians seeking
guidance and light. Other articles, by the Freudian psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs
and others, pursued psychoanalytical approaches.
Britain's own distinctive contribution was coloured less by rigorous thought
than comic invective and fury. The films Close Up preferred were from Germany,
the Soviet Union and the irreducibly avant-garde; they were rarely straight entertainment films, from Hollywood or Britain. Macpherson's first
editorial swerved into capital letters to pour extra cold water on the 'English
film revival': "REALLY the Englishman can only be roused to enthusiasm on the
football field.... One doesn't mind that, but in the face of it one does ask WHY
attempt art?" (June 1927). Oswell Blakeston, most prolific of the magazine's
writers, drew upon his studio experience as an assistant cameraman to gleefully
mock British lack of imagination and general ineptitude. Hugh Castle attacked
numerous British films, though no film suffered so much, perhaps, as the early
talkie revue The Co-optimists (1929), shot down by Ralph Bond: "Monotony beyond
conception… It isn't even dead, because it was never alive". Yet the drawbridge
wasn't always pulled up. Hitchcock's sound version of Blackmail (1929) was
welcomed: Macpherson himself wrote copiously in praise of its sound and image
counterpoint in the October 1929 issue. Anthony Asquith's work was also praised in the
magazine, though in more guarded terms.
While Close Up both enthused and excoriated with little regard for the mass
public taste, a mounting pile of film books, aimed more at a general readership,
tried to make sense of the burgeoning scene. Iris Barry's Let's Go the Movies
was joined in 1927 by the chatty and optimistic Films: Facts and Forecasts by
L'Estrange Fawcett, formerly film and drama critic for the Morning Post.
Hollywood was his chief focus, though seven admiring pages were devoted to
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925; not yet exhibited in Britain). The
following year saw This Film Business by the young, Oxford-educated Rudolph
Messel - equally cheery about cinema's artistic prospects, and equally
enthralled by Potemkin. Meanwhile, Blakeston's more jaundiced jollity coloured
his POOL volume Through a Yellow Glass, a guide for aspiring filmmakers in the
form of a tour of a British studio.
But none of these books, for all their pages, helped film comment in Britain
move far beyond the rhapsodic and subjective. Trained in science, Ivor Montagu
was particularly keen to explore and codify cinema's mechanics; in 1929 his
translation of Pudovkin's writings, Film Technique, concluding with a glossary
of technical terms, helped lay the first foundations for an understanding of
scenario construction, 'filmic space and time', and, above all, the dynamics of
editing. Yet the general reader took more notice of the pronouncements and map
of world cinema contained in Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, published by
Jonathan Cape in the autumn of 1930 - an influential survey that continued in
print, in different revisions, well into the 1970s. Pointedly, the book was
dedicated to "those among cinema audiences who wonder why and think how."
An artist by training, Rotha had found brief employment in 1928 in the art
department at British International Pictures: the experience gave a personal,
almost venomous twist to his horror of factory product. Carried along by youth's
certainties and arrogance (on publication he was just 23), Rotha arranged cinema
in a ladder of values, with the 'pure' cinema of abstract film on the top rung
and commercial musicals at the bottom. Such a strict ordering went blindly
against public judgements and, indeed, some of Rotha's own. His belief that the
artistic progress of cinema had been held back by its "misleading faculty for
being able to record the actual" would also need to be modified; during the
1930s, both as critic and film practitioner, Rotha moved closer to John
Grierson's documentary camp and became much keener to champion the 'real'. His
dogmatic opposition in the book to the use of colour and synchronised dialogue
("a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film")
proved equally hard to sustain.
Kenneth Macpherson, writing about The Film Till Now in Close Up, found fault
with individual judgements, but considered it "a praiseworthy and conscientious
work". Rotha's wondering, thinking audience members certainly took the book to
heart. Quirks and biases accepted, The Film Till Now became Britain's standard
cinema history, most valuable for its charting of world output up to 1930,
country by country. German cinema, with its strong design sense, secured Rotha's
strongest admiration; about Soviet cinema he was more circumspect than most.
British cinema he found over-praised, timid, with talent easily stifled, though
he showed good will with his self-designed dust jacket, featuring images from
Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), Grierson's Drifters (1929) and Light
Rhythms (1930), an abstract film by Francis Bruguière and Oswell Blakeston.
Preparatory to The Film Till Now, Rotha had contributed articles to a new
popular magazine, Film Weekly, edited by Herbert Thompson, launched in 1928.
Pages contained the customary fluff about stars' lives and fashions, though
there was also notable 'highbrow' input. The second issue, October 29, contained
Montagu's translation of a pivotal Pudovkin text; Pudovkin also regularly
appeared, in thought at least, in Rotha's articles on the components of film.
Between these two extremes lay the knowing journalism of Cedric Belfrage,
reporting from Hollywood, and the barbed writings of the magazine's studio
correspondent Nerina Shute, who once compared the face of character actress
Marie Ault to "an unappetising loaf of bread". Reviews of new releases in Film
Weekly were solid, sensible, and packed with information, but no film or star
won automatic reverence. By the end of the 1920s, with sharper writers and more
knowledgeable readers, reverence had to be earned.
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