The Cinema & the Classics
H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] [ The eleven articles that the Modernist poet and novelist H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] wrote for Close Up, a film journal of the early 20th century edited by Kenneth Macpherson, appeared in the journal’s first two years. The first three [reproduced here] appeared under the title ‘The Cinema and the Classics’. They are investigations and celebrations of film art as a new classicism, of a ‘beauty’ wholly submerged by Hollywood film, but revealed in the new German and Russian cinema (of Pabst, Kuleshov, Eisenstein) which is the topic of a number of H.D.’s subsequent Close Up articles. A number of the tenets expressed in the ‘Cinema and the Classics’ pieces echo the ‘Imagist’ aesthetics with which H.D.’s early poetry is associated – spareness, directness, ‘restraint’ – as well as the ‘Hellenism’ which was a central aspect of her poetics throughout her long writing career. The interplay between an aesthetics of formal restraint and one of emotional, spiritual or ‘psychic’ transcendence, between holding back and going beyond, runs throughout H.D.’s film writings. [From an introduction to these articles by Laura Marcus] I [CLOSE UP Vol 1, no 1, July 1927] BEAUTY I suppose we might begin rhetorically by asking, what is the cinema, what are the classics? For I don’t in my heart believe one out of ten of us highbrow intellectuals, Golders Greenites, Chautauqua lecturers, knows the least little bit about either. Classics. Cinema. The word cinema (or movies) would bring to nine out often of us a memory of crowds and saccharine music and longdrawn out embraces and the artificially enhanced thud-offs of galloping bronchoes. What would be our word-reaction to Classics? What to Cinema? Take Cinema to begin with, (cinema = movies), boredom, tedium, suffocation, pink lemonade, saw-dust even: old reactions connected with cheap circuses, crowds and crowds and crowds and illiteracy and more crowds and breathless suffocation and (if’we’ the editorial ‘us’ is an American) peanut shells and grit and perhaps a sudden collapse of jerry-built scaffoldings. Danger somewhere anyhow. Danger to the physical safety, danger to the moral safety, a shivering away as when ‘polities’ or ‘graft’ is mentioned, a great thing that must be accepted (like the pre-cinema days circus) with abashed guilt, sneaked to at least intellectually. The cinema or the movies is to the vast horde of the fair-to-middling intellectuals, a Juggernaught crushing out mind and perception in one vast orgy of the senses. So much for the cinema. (Our ‘classic’ word-reaction will come along in due course.) I speak here, when I would appear ironical, of the fair-to-middling intellectual, not of the fortunately vast-increasing, valiant, little army of the advance guard or the franctireur of the arts, in whose hands mercifully since the days of the stone-writers, the arts really rested. The little leaven. But the leaven, turning in the lump, sometimes takes it into its microscopic mind to wonder what the lump is about and why can’t the lump, for its own good, for its own happiness, for its own (to use the word goodness in its Hellenic sense) beauty, be leavened just a little quicker? The leaven, regarding the lump, is sometimes curious as to the lump’s point of view, for all the lump itself so grandiloquently ignores it, the microscopic leaven. And so with me or editorially ‘us’ at just this moment. Wedged securely in the lump (we won’t class ourselves as sniffingly above it), we want to prod our little microbe way into its understanding. Thereby having the thrill of our lives, getting an immense kick out of trying to see what it is up to, what I am up against, what we all, franc-tireurs, have to deal with. First as I say, amazing prejudice. The movies, the cinema, the pictures. Prejudice has sprouted, a rank weed, where the growth of wheat is thickest. In other words, film that blossom here in Europe (perhaps a frail, little, appreciated flower) are swiftly cut and grafted in America into a more sturdy, respectable rootstock. Take ‘Vaudeville’, for example, a film that I didn’t particularly revel in, yet must appreciate, Zolaesque realism which succeeded admirably in its medium; was stripped (by this gigantic Cyclops, the American censor) of its one bloom. The stem is valuable, is transplanted, but the spirit, the flower so to speak of ‘Vaudeville’ (we called it here ‘Variete’), the thing holding its created centre, its (as it happens) Zolaesque sincerity, is carefully abstracted. A reel or in some cases an artist or a producer, is carefully gelded before being given free run of the public. The lump heaving under its own lumpishness is perforce content, is perforce ignorant, is perforce so sated with mechanical efficiency, with whir and thud of various hypnotic appliances, that it doesn’t know what it is missing. The lump doesn’t know that it has been deprived of beauty, of the flower of some producer’s wit and inspiration. The lump is hypnotized by the thud-thud of constant repetition until it begins to believe, like the African tribesman, that the thump-thump of its medicine man’s formula is the only formula, that his medicine man is the only medicine man, that his god, his totem is (save for some neighbouring flat-faced almost similar effigies) the only totem. America accepts totems, not because the crowd wants totems, but because totems have so long been imposed on him, on it, on the race consciousness that it or him or the race consciousness is becoming hypnotized, is in danger of some race fixation; he or it or the race consciousness is so duped by mechanical efficiency and saccharine dramatic mediocrity that he or it doesn’t in the least know, in fact would be incapable (if he did know) of saying what he does want. He learns that there is a new European importation for instance of a ‘star’; this importation being thudded into his senses for some months beforehand, his mind is made up for him; she is beautiful. We take that for granted. There I agree, the leaven and the lump are in this at one. The lump really wants beauty or this totem of beauty would not be set up by its astute leaders. Beauty. She is beautiful. This time ‘she’ is a northern girl, a ‘nordic’, another word they fall for. A Nordic beauty has been acclaimed and we all