close up - Monoskop

THK CONTRIBUTION or H.D. 101
situation in Europe (Hitler became Chancellor in 1933) and the death of Bryher's
father at this time, Bryher represented it in her memoir as a direct result of 'the
collapse of the silent film'. The period between the late 1920s and early 1930s was,
Bryher writes:
the golden age of what I call 'the art that died' because sound ruined its
development. I have written already that we had to get away from the nineteenth
century if we were to survive. The film was new, it had no earlier associations
and it offered occasionally, in an episode or a single shot, some framework for
our dreams. We felt we could state our convictions honourably in the twentiethcentury
form of art and it appealed to the popular internationalism of those so
few years because 'the silents' offered a single language across Europe. 30
H.D.'s film-writings are less taken up with the issue of the transition to sound
than, for example, those of Dorothy Richardson; her Close Up contributions ceased at
the point at which the sound debate became central to the journal. A number of her
discussions suggest that cinema's promise was for her that of a 'universal culture'
(shared by, in her terms, 'the leaven and the lump') and that this was to an extent
independent of the silent/sound divide. In the third of her 'Cinema and the Classics'
articles, however, she focuses on the 'movietone', contrasting it (for the most part
unfavourably) with the 'masks' of silent cinema which, like those of Greek drama,
conceal, for H.D., a mystery and a vision destroyed by the 'mechanical', overtly
automated technologies of'movietone' sound. 31 Her film aesthetics and her model of
vision are predicated on symbol, gesture, 'hieroglyph', 'the things we can't say or
paint', as she writes in 'The Student of Prague'. 32 Her model of cinematic 'language'
is closer to, in Freud's terms, 'thing-presentation' than 'word-presentation', with the
work of writing-about-film acting as a form of translation from one to the other. 33 Her
film-writing tends to provide not retrospective judgement on a film, but a
performative running commentary on the processes of spectating which becomes a
form of'inner speech', acting as a screen onto which the film images can be
projected. 34
The contrast between H.D.'s narrative rendering of'inner speech' and 'social
speech' is highlighted in her account of her emergence from the realms of the 'pure'
dream-language of the film she has been watching into that of the debased, Babellanguages
(English and Americap English being represented as effete and philistine
respectively) of her fellow-spectators:
A small voice, a wee voice that has something in common with all these voices
yet differs intrinsically from all these voices, will whisper there within me, 'You
see I was right. You see it will come. In spite of "Gee" and "Doug Fairbanks"
and "we must have something cheerful", it must come soon; a universal
language, a universal art open alike to the pleb and the initiate. 35
H.D.'s and Bryher's accounts of the 'universal language' of film are also closely
echoed in H.D.'s writings on psychoanalysis, and, more specifically, in her gloss on
Freudian dream-interpretation in Tribute to Freud: