close up - Monoskop

THE CONTRIBUTION OF H.D. 103
the work of the 'transcendentalists' Emerson and Thoreau, and in Poe, Hawthorne,
Melville and Whitman. 44
The dream of recapturing a prelapsarian, universal, pictographic language fed
directly into early film aesthetics. Its chief North American exponent was the poet and
critic Vachel Lindsay, author of the first book of film theory, The Art of the Moving
Picture, published in 1915. 45 Here, as in his subsequent writings on cinema, The
Progress and Poetry of the Movies, and in his poetry, Lindsay spelled out his vision of
modern America (with its advertisements, billboards, newspaper photographs, signwritings)
as 'a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England'. 46 In The
Art of the Moving Picture, in which he painstakingly analyses a set of Egyptian
hieroglyphs, their Roman letter equivalents and their equivalents in 'the movingpicture
alphabet', 47 Lindsay writes:
Because ten million people daily enter into the cave, something akin to Egyptian
wizardry, certain national rituals, will be born. By studying the matter of being
an Egyptian priest for a little while, the author-producer may learn in the end
how best to express and satisfy the spirit hungers that are peculiarly American.
It is sometimes out of the oldest dream that the youngest vision is born. 48
The expatriate, European-identified, anti-Hollywood, avant-garde H.D.'s models of
'universal culture' may seem remote from Lindsay's concerns with 'our America of
Tomorrow', just as her habitual emphasis on hieroglyphic language as a coded, secret
knowledge is apparently at odds with a model of hieroglyphics as, in Nick Browne's
words, 'a mode of reading that bypasses critical judgement'. 49 There are, nonetheless,
interesting links between these two poets and writers on film, not least their
Swedenborgian perceptions of the power of'light' and of the world as a 'grammar of
hieroglyphs'. 50 The issue is less, however, the echoes of Lindsay's film-writing in
H.D.'s. It is rather their shared, as well as disparate, relationships to the complex
representations of film culture and language in the early twentieth century, and to the
national, racial, democratic and commercial ideologies which these articulated -
which could be gathered under, in Miriam Hansen's phrase, the 'ambiguous
celebration of film as a new universal language, as a historically unique chance to
"repair the ruins of Babel"'. 51
In her brilliant reading of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (a film which represents
history, culture and 'race' through writing-systems, inscriptions, Babel-languages,
'writings on the wall'), in the context of early cinema and the public sphere, Hansen
states: 'If Intolerance is proposing to recover a unity of popular and high art, it does so
not by replacing writing with a superior language of visual presence, but by retrieving
the common roots of both film and literature in the hieroglyphic tradition.' 52 This also
works well as a way into H.D.'s conceptual strategies. It allows us to move beyond the
opposition H.D. offers in Tribute to Freud-the (non-)choice between 'the writing on
the wall' she saw in Corfu as 'symptom or inspiration' 53 - and to understand her focus
on inscriptions and hieroglyphs as a form of cultural theorizing, whose roots may well
lie in the Transcendentalist tradition of 'American hieroglyphs' and its understanding
of hieroglyphics as both esoteric script and populist communication.