Close Up

‘After three years this film, attempting yet again to deal with the problematising of filmic representation in sound and image: the overtly politically-polemical soundtrack from Nicaragua must not synchronise with, nor must it find a separate continuum of reality away from, the image sequences.
Without avoiding the interrogation of narrative/anti narrative cinematic structures (the way the images, and the sounds, at times hold/do not hold . . .or the way they attempt to force a position contradictory to any representational imaginary or homogeneity, of constructed space, time, ego, language, film) an attempted materialist use of sound and image must be at the same time an anti-individualist work.
Both the sound-contradictions, and the image-contradictions, of subjectivity in this film (and of this film) must be in constant process with/against the political polemic: the film can not allow for a final exclusion of either (neither some pure documentary reality nor some pure formal dialectic). The viewer’s attempts, via her/his/the cultural context of meaning making (political/sexual, narrative) are worked against by the film’s process.
The work against the capitalist patriarchal position of narrative, in other words, is (still, and in specificity) the main interest.’ – P.G., August 1983.
‘At a time when British cinema in the independent sector provides a dismal, visually illiterate and politically dubious product, Close Up is crystal hard, intransigent, and film in extremis. In short, one of the best ‘political’ films made in this country.’ – Michael O’Pray, Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan 1984.