Close-Up Year 20

To mark the 20th anniversary of Close-Up, Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne invited filmmakers who have previously shown work at the venue to create a short film about Close-Up. This programme brings together 50 films by: Ute Aurand, Kerry Baldry, Jenny Baines, Oliver Bancroft, Stephanie Barber, Ruth Beckermann, Nick Collins, Jill Daniels, Nina Danino, Amy Dickson, Karel Doing, William English, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, Larry Gottheim, Nicky Hamlyn, Lucy Harris, Jim Hobbs, Lizzy Hobbs, James Holcombe, Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin, Adam Kossoff, Andrew Kötting, Steven Littman, Susu Laroche, David Leister, Lynn Loo, Martin Lugg, Alex MacKenzie, Steven McInerney, Simon Payne, Deborah Phillips, Chris Petit, Sarah Pucill, William Raban, Emily Richardson, Ben Rivers, Adam Roberts, Edwin Rostron, Frances Scott, Luke Seomore, Guy Sherwin, John Smith, Vicky Smith, Roman Štětina, Anna Thew, Eve Thompson, Peter Todd, Andrew Vallance, Karen Yasinsky, Andrea Luka Zimmerman

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If You Build It... Close-Up at 20 and 10
by Gareth Evans

In Memoriam Gwendolyn Leick & Louis Benassi

A thought experiment: Damien Sanville is wandering - not through a cornfield on a farm in Iowa, but towards Spitalfields City Farm across Allen Gardens just off Brick Lane – when he hears a voice, with a strong Glaswegian accent, saying, "What the feck are you doing, Damien feckin' Sanville? Feckin' build it..."

Sanville looks around. Sure, there are all sorts of edgeland characters within swearing distance, but none with such a delivery, and none looking hard at him. He wanders on. He hears it again. He stops. He looks around again. He starts to think....

We cannot rely on structures anymore (if we ever could). Whether government departments, institutions, corporate or state endeavours, nothing is inherently functioning or delivering to the equal and mutual benefit of all who need or encounter the organisation in question. Only individuals, finding themselves with agency and a perhaps brief moment of leverage, affect change in such networks. This is why those who wish to make a difference in their world gather collectively outside of such arrangements (which might fossilise in due course, but for our purposes, not yet...). If this suggests an anarchist positioning then, yes, spray-paint a black circled A on my sweating forehead.

Filmic so-called support has failed us more than most - whether national or commercial, from production through to exhibition. Disagree? Let's take it outside, to the car park on the other side of Sclater Street, where Sanville started his London life in 1998, a market stall operator with dreams bigger than a trestle table could hold. At this point, still closer to a croissant than a bagel in terms of a baked breakfast choice, he could not quite know what he would set in motion in 2005 around the corner at 139 Brick Lane.

We used to take it for granted – did we? I did, back in the mythical day – that things we loved might remain indefinitely, unthreatened. Not anymore: now, it's very much the case that I'm amazed anything good can actually start. People remain wondrous constellations of generative possibility; the good ones, anyway. And I am a great supporter of stuff taking place without the scaffolding of finance, but that's not a viable totalising principle, threaded as it is with various privileges, monetary or otherwise. But when it comes to new operations, based around walls and floors and roofs and doors, in such times as we find ourselves, well, all power and wishes to those who leap into the spreadsheet of accounting.

They often say, "if X didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it". Sure, I agree. But what if you simply couldn't anymore? "What are you talking about?", they say. And I reply, well, first of all, a film and book library (one of only two still standing in England) in 2005, on what is now one of the most property-pressured streets in the country; and then, a decade on, and adding to that cultural wealth, a cafe/bar, event meeting place and cinematheque committed to world cinema, artists' film and the most distinctive cinephiliac one-offs – just metres from said thoroughfare – that not only survives, but thrives. Sanville is reticent about his achievement, declaring simply that “my job is to give my 18-year-old self the opportunity to watch the films that once transformed him.” As Rimbaud, writing about Sanville, once observed, now "Je est un autre." There's an open sign on the pane.

In a rentier economy, space is everything. Space becomes a place when purpose and people meet. Mood makes the place more than simply a site. Mood is made by those who work the waystation's waterfront, past, present and onwards. They are at the till and bar, behind the projector, in the office, clearing up after lights out. They know who they are. We raise a large glass of our fancy to their marvellous being in the world.

They, from director-founder on, enact a spatial possibility, one which the 'community' of divergent creative difference that is drawn through their doors can lay a supportive claim to populating. Punching way above its scale, its private hire enables a public good. In one of the dead-centres of financialised speculative capital, Close-Up is both a business and more. Having outlived threats to the life of its medium specificity, and the challenges wrought by privatised home-streaming, it now embodies its own necessity, in person. 

Things have come full circle, better Sclater than never. Let us not forget this place was 'made', by those still with us and those who have passed too soon from view. Picture Sanville (surely the name of a soon to be discovered cultural heritage district across La Manche), said irrepressible Glaswegian Benassi and remarkable patron Gwendolyn Leick, high on their own supply of sheer enthusiasm, in those days before the summer 2015 opening of the screen.

If you build it, they will come.

It's time for your Close-Up.

Gareth Evans knows where Close-Up is.

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Image: Unseen Enemy, D.W. Griffith was used for the first flyer to promote Close-Up video library in 2005