Recovering H. D.'s Film Writing From the Little Magazine Era

Film Comment's last issue before a hopefully-very-brief hiatus features an article by film critic Sheila O'Malley about poet H. D.'s unrecognized writing on cinema in the age of Close Up (1927–1933). "Perhaps the disappearance of her film criticism is due to the fact that Close Up had a small circulation geared to an international audience, and also that it lasted for such a short period of time (due to the development of sound films—which none of the contributors approved of—as well as Hitler’s rise to power)," writes O'Malley. More:

…Could it also be that H.D.’s work has been ignored because, in general, literary critics don’t read about movies, and film critics don’t read about poetry, and so neither group paid (or pay) attention to what H.D. was doing? But H.D., as evidenced in a 1927 letter to friend Viola Jordan, had extremely strong emotions about the art form: “I feel [film] is the living art, the thing that WILL count.” Considering that H.D. was friends (and in some cases lovers) with Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, her belief in the supremacy of cinema is striking.

[…]

A collection of the writings in Close Up, edited by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, was published in 1998. These essays offer glimpses of cinema at the moment when it heaved itself through enormous change, as well as first reactions to films which now make up the international canon. It’s refreshing to read film criticism before it was codified into a certain accepted form and orthodoxy. Some of these pieces are wild and experimental. When “Hollywood” is mentioned in Close Up, it’s usually with derision (although there is a very entertaining interview that Bryher did with Anita Loos). H.D. sums up the collective’s lofty mission: “It is the duty of every sincere intellectual to work for the better understanding of the cinema, for the clearing of the ground, for the rescuing of this superb art, from its hide-bound conventions.”

As the essay on Pabst and The Joyless Street shows, H.D.’s film criticism, like her poetry, is always personal. She walks you through her experience. In her review of Lev Kuleshov’s 1926 silent film By the Law (which H.D. called Expiation), she starts with a description of getting to the theater…. 

Read on at Film Comment.