Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze: “Inter-Active” Cinema in the Film Writing of HD and Dorothy Richardson

Abstract

In a 1927 column on cinema, the poet HD inquires, “Isn’t cinema art a matter (or hasn’t it been) of inter-action?” (Close Up 116). In their writing for the international little film magazine Close Up, published from 1927–33, HD and the novelist Dorothy Richardson are proponents of a unique version of cinematic aura. Both writers describe cinema as a modern “church”, “temple”, or “sanctuary”, a space that is both transcendent and a “matter … of inter-action”, as HD puts it. While Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, appreciates the distractions of cinema as a mimesis of modern experience, HD and Richardson value cinematic absorption. They define cinema as an “auratic” medium in Benjamin’s terms in that shared cinema spectatorship is perceived as a ritualistic, authentic experience defined by holistic construction rather than by shattering defamiliarization. At the same time, like Benjamin, both HD and Richardson perceive film as participatory and revelatory of what Benjamin calls the “optical unconscious”, or “another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye” (37). Only with the emergence of the sound film in the late 1920s, did the “congregation” formed by silent cinema shatter. For HD and Richardson, silent cinema could signify the ineffable, that which could not be put into their own medium of words.¹