"Fifty odd years hasn’t done so badly in getting an art into the world that fifty more will probably turn into THE art, but now, after somewhat magnificent growth, one feels here is its critical age. Its humble Pier Penny Peep Show beginning is still far too evident, and one sees that in a very short while the thing that people now go to see will have become tradition, and standard, as the past tense in literature, harmony in music, and representative conventions in painting. Public was right enough FOR public when it began by saying ‘Films are trash’. They went on being trash, but more pompous trash, and the public took to them. It was all purely box office stunts. Art had nothing to do with it. That was all perfectly alright. I went myself solemnly at the age of nine and watched stockades being burned by Indians in one reel, and although I wasn’t sold on what I had gone to look at, I got the mesmerism of the thing, and something quite apart from purely conscious felt, oh yes, this is right, this is apt. This belongs.
"The thing was, first of all, to get the medium developed so far as to be FIT for art. Box office stunts meant that one film producer was competing with other film producers, and it was up to them to get in first on anything new, and watch out, and borrow or purloin ideas, to develop and outshine with....
"I want to arrange that people making films, and experimenting in all sorts of ways shall be able to see what others are doing in the same way. Which means public showing, in Paris and London, one hopes….something must be done to give films their due…The first two numbers of Close Up will deal with the film problem as a whole. After that we propose in each issue to deal with special conditions in Europe and the States with numbers on the Negro attitude and problem and on the Far East in their relation to the cinema."
--Kenneth Macpherson “As Is” Close Up July 1927, vol I, no. 1
(reprinted Donald 36-40)

Compiled by Sabrina Rissing (Class of '06, Davidson College).