Polly Hember, Royal Holloway, University of London
‘It really is time we had a bit more cinema’, Robert Herring writes in the film journal Close Up in 1929, ‘[t]here hasn’t been much cinema yet, although men have been so busy making films for so long, and there will never be unless the magic of it is realised.’[1] The imploration for ‘more’ cinema, despite the fact it had been over three decades since the medium’s first screening in 1895, speaks to the difficult relationship between cinema, its past and its future. Cinema’s early reception and interpretation was accompanied with a curious tension regarding its definition, purpose and cultural status. Caught between silence and sound, between avant-garde art and commercial Hollywood, writing on film was often conflicted. Herring was a film critic and modernist author, writing for the Manchester Guardian and was editor of The London Mercury (1925 – 1927). He was a satellite of the enigmatic POOL group, who published the influential film journal Close Up. His essay ‘A New Cinema, Magic and the Avant Garde’ engages with the manifold anxieties around film’s birth and future whilst also illuminating the magical compulsion that cinema possesses, which he also viewed as its salvation.
Critics have repeatedly claimed cinema was backwards or out of time. Much like F. Stott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button who was born a naïve septuagenarian and grows younger as time advances, Ivor Brown describes film as ‘an art in search of its youth […] The cinema was born old; or rather it was not born at all, but manufactured […] It was no sooner discovered than exploited; no sooner exploited than corrupted.’[2] Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on cinema avers that ‘while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say.’[3] Cinema’s future was also tense, caught between definitions of experimental, avant-garde art and, as Kenneth Macpherson critiques in Close Up, ‘purely box office stunts. Art had nothing to do with it.’[4] With the impact and aftermath of WWI; film censorship; the commercial dominance of Hollywood; the Quota Act in 1927 (to increase the number of British films made); and the advent of the Film Society in 1925 (bypassing UK censorship laws through the private screening of international films), the contested reception of film destabilised cinema’s cultural status. Laura Marcus illuminates how cinema adopted ‘a variety of vantage points and perspectives, inclusionist and exclusionist, ironic and otherwise.’[5] Like poor Benjamin Button, who, on meeting his future wife, does not want to ‘mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of his origin’ but is also terrified about the uncertain direction of his future (‘His destiny seemed to him awful, incredible’), cinema in the early twentieth-century seemed similarly conflicted.[6] It looked backwards to its origins but was simultaneously propelled forward by the avant-garde into a fast-moving modernity. Herring notes this displacement, in which critics debate cinema’s authenticity and autonomy, and offers up a solution: ‘magic’.
Herring’s article ‘A New Cinema, Magic and the Avant Garde’ engages with the manifold tensions surrounding cinema’s “true” purpose – art or ingenuity – and suggests the avant-garde imposition to distort or experiment has disregarded the magical potentiality for representation and expression within wider cinema. Herring argues that ‘[we] cannot approach to a new cinema unless we understand what is at the bottom of cinema’, conveying an impulse that is not, perhaps, as backwards looking as Brown’s assessment, but rather a stratigraphic desire to exhume cinema so as to discover a medium that ‘is the result of our realising what cinema is.’[7] Herring believes this foundational magic of cinema is in its relation to reality and its representation: ‘I don’t mean a studio story. Don’t care about he loves and she loves so why can’t they love. Mean the drama of all around us and what we fit into. Activity. Ordinary business. […] cinema getting right down to the behindness of it.’[8]
The cinema, unlike other art forms, has a unique ability to represent the ordinary, the quotidian magic that Herring celebrates. The notion of capturing people, places, movement and, later, conversations on film and offering them as public viewings through projections of light offers wholly new modes of relating time, space, travel, and movement. Walter Benjamin explores the ‘close-up’, ‘focusing on hidden details of familiar objects’ and simultaneously exposes an ‘immense and unexpected filed of action’ in which ‘space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. […] a different nature opens itself to the camera that opens to the naked eye.’[9] Cinema’s ability to capture the present, to expose hidden aspects of the everyday, and transport its audience to various places or times, is all part of its extraordinary attraction. There is also a fantastical element in the mechanical process of projection. Herring delights in the magical transmission and transmutation of a curiously embodied light:
‘There is the screen, and you know the projector is at the back of you.
Overhead is the beam of light which links the two. Look up. See it spread
out. It is wider and thinner. Its fingers twitch, they spread in blessing or
they convulse in terror. They tap you lightly or they drag you in, Magic
fingers writing on the wall […] One strand of the beam widens, a whiter
finger detaches itself, goes off over the screen, while the others wait,
continue, keep the thing going, confident it will return. The finger is a
cowboy’s hat.’ [10]
This magic has an extraordinary phenomenological impact on the audience; the projection light’s magic fingers can split and transform their audience, too: ‘By moving your fingers before the beam, you interrupt them; by walking before it your body absorbs them. You hold them, you can let them go. When the projector stops, they stop. Their life is suspended, and can be begun at any point. They are always potentially there, ready to be let out.’[11] The collision between spectator and spectacle is the affective power of cinema: the ‘drama of contingency’ that Sara Ahmed explores, how bodies are ‘profoundly touched by what comes near.’[12]
Early twentieth-century critics like Brown wrote anxiously about cinema, its past and its direction. Herring asked his contemporaries not to look backwards at the past, and implored the avant-garde to regroup: ‘I watch the avant-garde and I can’t see where its avant-ness lies. Cinema’s more than tricks and the raising of natures-mortes to Lazarus life.’[13] He reflects, ‘I don’t see what the avant-garde is in front of’, instead he implores: ‘Let’s experiment, let’s not rust in a rut, but let’s not side-step out of development.’[14] In his introspective experimentation, Herring illuminates many issues around cinema’s representation and purpose, exposing a phenomenological magic that buzzes and beams from the very foundations of film.
Sources:
[1] Robert Herring, ‘A New Cinema, Magic and the Avant Garde’, Close Up, 4 (April, 1929), 47–57, (p. 57); (p. 47).
[2] Ivor Brown, ‘An Art in Search of its Youth’, The Saturday Review (19 January 1924), 56–7
[3] Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 – 1995: An Anthology of Writings, ed. by Michael O’Pray (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996) pp. 33–36, (p. 36).
[4] Kenneth Macpherson, ‘As Is’, Close Up, vol. I, no. 1 (July, 1927), pp. 5–15, (p. 5).
[5] Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 298.
[6] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (London: Penguin, 1992) p. 1; p. 21.
[7] Herring, p. 47.
[8] Herring, p. 51.
[9] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 236.
[10] Herring, p. 51.
[11] Herring, p. 52.
[12] Sara Ahmed, ‘Creating Disturbance: Feminism, Happiness and Affective Differences’, Working With Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences, ed. by Marianne Liljestrom and Susanna Paasonen (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 31–44, (p. 33).
[13] Herring, p. 53.
[14] Herring, p. 54.
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