Close Up & Wars They Saw: From Visual Erotics to a Transferential Politics of Film

In an unpublished interview conducted by Virginia Smeyers in December 1979, Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894) repeated: “film was not my métier,” retrospectively attributing her excitement about film and filmmaking to H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Kenneth Macpherson.1 While there may be some truth to this, her insistence upon her non-centrality in the trio’s venture into cinema protests too much. Bryher, H.D., and Macpherson made three experimental films together, including Borderline (1930). In addition, Bryher’s money funded Close Up (1927-1933), to which all three contributed work. It was, after all, the first international journal of its kind that surveyed every aspect of avant-garde film, including work by Sergei Eisenstein (featuring first translations), Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Oswell Blakeston, Robert Herring, Hanns Sachs, Dorothy Richardson, and Bryher herself. Close Up remains a rich repository of many stills from now lost films.2 Anne Friedberg describes the journal as “situated symmetrically on the brink of two decades; at the threshold, as well as between silent cinema and sound film” (4). Close Up also reflected the hydraulic shift from the relatively liberating Weimar culture of the 1920s to its increasing repression in the 1930s. It is no coincidence that the journal shut down with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The journal functioned, to quote my epigraph from Stevens, between the “intervals of a storm.” Bryher was the daughter of a shipping magnate, Sir John Ellerman, the richest man in England when he died in 1933. Close Up had been launched six years earlier, at which time Bryher was already using her