close up - Monoskop

THK, CONTRIBUTION OF H.D. 99
experience of World War I throughout her life). They serve, nonetheless, to represent
the risks taken by the experimental film-maker, by contrast with the conservative and
conventional 'snipers' in the traditional arts, and to conceptualize film as a 'no-man's
land', which is also (and here we find the concept of film as a 'universal language',
discussed more fully below) 'an everyman's land'.
H.D. also shared Robert Herring's fascination with the cinema as magic. In his 'A
New Cinema, Magic and the Avant Garde', Herring speaks of the 'magical... reality
of light and of movement', of'the fact that light is of all things what we need most and
respond to most', and of the 'magic' of the cinematic apparatus:
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, and
able to become at will ... a sword or a acetylene drill, a plume or waterfall. But
most of all they are an Aaron's rod flowering on the wall opposite, black glass
and crystal flowers ... Only now and again the rod becomes a snake, and whose
films are those we know. ...
You need not be a chamber to be haunted, nor need you own the Roxy to let
loose the spirit of cinema on yourself. You can hire or buy or get on the easy
system, a projector. You then have, on the occasions on which it works, people
walking on your own opposite wall. 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. 20
Herring's models of the destruction of the 'aura' (the distance between spectator and
spectacle) and of the blurring of a body/world division as the spectator inserts him or
herself into the spectacle are characteristic of modernized vision and its altered
perceptions of subject/object relationships. ('The film, by setting the landscape in
motion and keeping us still, allows it to walk through us,' wrote Dorothy
Richardson. 21 ) His article imagines a future for cinema, an 'avant-garde', in which
images would be rendered visible without the mediation of the screen, bodies and
beings becoming solid projections of themselves. There is 'no reason', Herring writes,
'why [man] should not ultimately create himself in motion and speech, moving in the
patterns of his creation'.
Herring's images in this article, his 'hieroglyphs' (rod, snake, flower), strikingly
anticipate those of H.D.'s epic poem Trilogy. 22 More broadly, his vision of humanity
(re)creating itself in a form of virtual reality is echoed in H.D.'s claim, in her article
'Turksib\ that in the great films -Joyless Street, Jeanne Ney, Mother - 'people moved,
acted, suffered, we might also say for the first time, not parodies of people, at best
ghosts, but spirits'. She writes (echoing Eisenstein, discussed below) of Turksib:
'"Thought," one wanted to shout aloud, "is here for the first time adequately
projected," ... These are not images made artificially but thought itself, seen for the
first time, in actual progression. These images are not projected after they have been
manufactured.' 2 ? For H.D, as for Herring, the power of cinema came increasingly to
reside in the absence, or the fantasy of the absence, of technological mediation. It is a