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CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE: DOROTHY RICHARDSON 759
Richardson, despite her consistent writing and theorizing against the coming of
sound (or, more precisely, speech) could thus also be seen as a 'convert' of a kind. The
aesthetic of the silent film becomes the gift of the transition to sound, brought into
(new) being by what succeeds it. By implication, if the sound film is the film 'gone
male', the implication may be not only that the film was once 'female', as Anne
Friedberg has argued (and that silent film articulated a feminine aesthetic), 45 but that
the coming of sound has (retrospectively) constructed, and bestowed, the space of the
silent film as the space of women.
Throughout her column Richardson celebrates the cinema as a women's sphere, at
times representing the picture palace as hospice, refuge and church, akin to the
Quaker church and its embodied silences to which she was drawn throughout her
adult life. Yet if the cinema is at one level a 'retreat', it also gives access to a new public
sphere. In rural communities, she writes in 'The Cinema in Arcady', audiences are
'becoming world citizens', empowered to join in 'the world-wide conversations now
increasingly upon us in which the cinema may play, amongst its numerous other roles,
so powerful a part'. 46 In her penultimate 'Continuous Performance' article, 'The Film
Gone Male', she both mourns the loss of the 'old time films gracious silence' and
reinserts it at, and as, the 'changeless heart' of the new, where it transmutes into
female power, women's contributions to 'the world-wide conversations' now, and
increasingly exigently, as the 1930s advance, taking place:
The new film can, at need, assist Radio in turning the world into a vast councilchamber
and do more than assist, for it is the freer partner. And multitudinous
within that vast chamber as within none of the preceding councils of mankind,
is the unconquerable, unchangeable eternal feminine. Influential. 47