Close Up (Jan-Jun 1929)

CLOSE UP be impossible to sit through. And, to be just, which is always unwise, probably they do have silent valuations for story or psychology, though we never hear about them. Indeed, form, balance, rhythm, pattern, construction, become — if I may again borrow Herr Kraszna-Krausz' simile — like the graduations along their critical rulers ; a system of geometry and mathematics which at its most expansive could create nothing richer than an architect's plan. And an architect's plan is only a beginning. To the onlooker it is the girder swinging up on the crane that has the interest. And w^hen all that is done it is only a building until people go and live in it. Landscapes, that Mr. Herring talks about further on, were criticised as beautiful, rich in tonal quality, amazingly delicate, or dull and under-exposed until panchromatic film came along and revalued them. But nobody said anything about that, and new landscapes with rolling cloud and beauties for rain and wind are still criticised as rich in tone or underexposed. " Sense of form " and " pictorial sense " go, too, without challenge or change, but that was to be expected. It would appear that the pictorial sense in an early-ish Griffith had nothing less to it than the pictorial sense of a late-ish Eisenstein. And to look back at what was said of Caligari we would certainly think it better than Ten Days had we not recently seen Caligari in Berlin, and been driven out by boredom half-way through. Analysis of method is interesting and rewarding, too, provided it is not made the basis of all critical judgment. Thus to discover that one good director does this or that and then to sav that no film is w^ell directed unless the director 7