close up - Monoskop

CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE: DOROTHY RICHARDSON 757
thing perceived and herself perceiving. ... Not all the wiles of the most perfect
art can shift her from the centre where she dwells.
Down through the centuries men and some women have pathetically
contemplated art as a wonder outside themselves. It is only in recent years that
man has known beauty to emanate from himself, to be his gift to what he sees.
And the dreadful woman asserting herself in the presence of no matter what
grandeurs unconsciously testifies that life goes on, art or no art, and that the
onlooker is part of the spectacle. 38
The modern woman, Richardson suggests, in her projects of self-realization, refuses
the position of passive spectator; the cinema is the means whereby she inserts herself
into the spectacle. Women find themselves, it is suggested, both in and in tension with
the aesthetic of the silent cinema. The (female) spectator is neither absorbed by nor
subsumed into the spectacle. We might compare this with Siegfried Kracauer's
account of the cinema spectator as the self who 'relinquishes its power of control...
"In the theater I am always I", a perceptive French woman once told this writer, "but
in the cinema I dissolve into all things and beings"'. 39
If in the silent cinema the modern woman speaks, however, 'the feminine' is finally
revealed in women's silence in the face of the coming of sound. In one of her last
articles for Close Up, 'The Film Gone Male', Richardson suggests that silent film was
essentially feminine, revealing 'something of the changeless being at the heart of all
becoming ... In its insistence on contemplation it provided a pathway to reality. In
becoming audible and particularly in becoming a medium of propaganda, it is
doubtless fulfilling its destiny. But it is a masculine destiny. The destiny of planful
becoming, rather than of purposeful being'. 40 Richardson returns to this idea of
woman as Being, man as Becoming throughout her writing. It goes against the
prevalent concept of the New Woman as an 'evolving' creature and is a central aspect
of the suspicions Richardson expressed towards 'evolutionary' models of history and,
more specifically, of women.
The epigraph Richardson used for her 'Continuous Performance' article on 'the
woman, girl, who uses the C. as boudoir, trysting place, weepery' was 'Animal
impudent and she was writing, she suggested to Bryher 'for & against her'. 41 The
epigraph is intended to recall, mockingly, Juvenal's satire on women: Richardson's
article is in part a satire on satires of women, just as many of her representations of
'types' of women are in fact satirical sketches of men's idealized and/or demonized
versions of femininity. Although some of her pronouncements in her film writing, as
in Pilgrimage, suggest an 'essentializing' view of masculinity and femininity, her
definitions, gendered and otherwise, are radically unstable, veering between the
historical and the mythic in the construction of'woman'. Moreover, she replays, in
'Continuous Performance', arguments made in the 'non-cinematic' contexts of
articles written in the early 1920s about women and art and women and 'the
feminine', 42 inserting her views into the spectacle of the cinema and (for the most part
implicitly) catching them up in the complex relationships between the 'retrogressive'
images of the feminine projected onto the screen and the 'progressive' dimensions of