close up - Monoskop

100 CLOSE UP
fantasy usefully understood, and grounded, through Walter Benjamin's account of the
paradoxical aesthetic of cinema in 'The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction' (1936):
for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably
more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the
thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of
reality which is free of equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a
work of art. 24
Herring's concepts of projection and of cinema as a 'writing on the wall' (recalling
Lumiere's name for cinema - 'cinematographic' - 'writing in movement') are central
to H.D.'s project of'cinematobiography'. 25 In Tribute to Freud, one of the accounts
H.D. wrote of her 1933/4 analysis with Freud in Vienna, she represents her memories
and dreams as moments of vision which are also moments in a history of pre-cinema
and cinema: Aristotelian 'after-images'; an Archimedean construction of a burninglens,
as she recalls her brother using their astronomer father's magnifying glass to
make fire - 'Under the glass, on the paper, a dark spot appeared; almost
instantaneously the newspaper burst into flames.' 26 Most strikingly, there is the
'writing on the wall', her 'visionary' experience in Corfu in the early 1920s, which
Freud apparently saw as the 'most dangerous symptom' and H.D. viewed as her most
significant life-experience. She recounts, frame by frame, the inscription of
hieroglyphs, images projected onto a wall in light not shadow. The first are like
magic-lantern slides, the later images resemble the earliest films. 27 (I discuss the
significance of H.D.'s 'hieroglyphics' below.) In a further memoir, The Gift, an
account of her childhood, earliest memories appear as daguerreotypes, recent ones as
films in colour. 28 As in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, autobiography is intertwined
with a history of optics, the past is recalled by means of the technologies of memory,
and, as Dianne Chisholm notes, child development is represented as technological
advance. 29
For H.D, as for Bryher, cinema and psychoanalysis were closely identified projects,
historically and conceptually, their connection cemented in the cinema of Pabst,
whose Secrets of a Soul was supervised by the psychoanalysts Dr Hanns Sachs (who
became Bryher's analyst and wrote three short articles for Close Up) and Dr Karl
Abraham. In the spring of 1933, as Close Up entered its final year and Bryher began to
commit her considerable energies and financial resources to helping the enemies and
the victims of fascism, H.D. left for Vienna and for psychoanalysis with Freud,
bearing the recommendation of Hanns Sachs.
Although H.D does not refer to her work on and in film in the (published)
accounts she wrote of her analysis, the poetics and the politics of cinema and
psychoanalysis become, at times, indistinguishable. It is probable that Bryher and
H.D. saw the sessions with Freud as a way of continuing the work of film, finding in
dream and symbolic interpretation an equivalent to, and extension of, the 'language'
of the silent cinema, which they invested with both individual and 'universal'
significance. Although the demise of Close Up almost certainly came about as a result
of Macpherson's withdrawal of interest in film, combined with the changing political