H.D.'s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire

The poet H.D.'s film-related work of the late-1920s and early-1930s constitutes an important chapter in the history of female modernist theorizing about vision. Through her essays for the film journal Close Up (which she helped to found and edit), her participation in the POOL group's production of several silent films, and her autobiographically-inflected fiction of the period, H.D. participated in and helped to modify a number of discourses within modernist visual culture. ¹

Looking at the body of work H.D. produced during this period for what it might tell us about the nature of modernist visuality, I am struck by a recurring image: that of a woman (H.D. herself or her fictional protagonists) fixedly staring. Figure 1, from the 1930 film Borderline, suggests the level of intensity that H.D. as an actor and Kenneth Macpherson as her director invested in her stare: the image, a close-up of H.D. looking directly and intently into the camera, remains on screen for ten seconds. Other examples of the sustained, fixed stare abound in the film as well as in H.D.'s prose. In her 1926 story "Hipparchia," published the year before the founding of Close Up, the primary character is repeatedly characterized as "staring, wide-eyed," gazing fixedly, regarding, considering, contemplating, and not only looking but looking and looking. A paragraph describing Hipparchia's visual experience certainly suggests a cinema spectator fascinated and immobilized by patterns of light on a screen: "Her eyes, wide open, stared now upon the squares of neat ceiling . . . Her eyes saw light break across the ceiling, an angle of clear light. . . . She came back (staring, wide-eyed) to the ceiling across which the outer light had wandered." ² A well-known example of H.D.'s rapt, entranced gaze appears in her 1944 description of a hallucinatory vision she experienced in 1920: "I do not budge an inch or break the sustained crystal-gazing stare at the wall before me. . . . my own head is splitting with the ache of concentration. I know that if I let go, lessen the intensity of my stare and shut my eyes or even blink my eyes, the pictures will fade out." ³

What is H.D.'s stare, and why is it such a recurring feature of her representations and self-representations? What is the possible connection of her relentlessly fixed stare to the visual culture(s) of modernism? How and why is her film-related work so invested in an aesthetic of stasis? How was H.D.'s "involve[ment] with pictures" linked to the dynamics of her domestic ménage in the late-1920s and early-1930s, which consisted of herself, her longtime female companion Bryher, and Macpherson (her bisexual male lover and Bryher's husband) and which formed the basis of the POOL film production company and the Close Up editorial board? ⁴ I suggest that investigating H.D.'s stare may tell us something about the contradictions and coexistences at the heart of modernist visuality and, more particularly, about the role of lesbian desire in the model of spectatorship emerging in her work.

H.D.'s abiding interest in stasis and fixity in visual experience runs counter to a significant discussion among her contemporaries about modern subjectivity and vision: that of the concept of "distraction" and its relation to mass cultural expressive forms, particularly the cinema. The nature of "distraction" was being extensively explored in the film criticism of Weimar Germany, where H.D., Bryher, and Macpherson spent time participating in Berlin's burgeoning film culture, seeing new films unavailable in England or Switzerland, and meeting directors like G. W. Pabst. ⁵ Many of H.D.'s German contemporaries, most notably Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, theorized distraction as a peculiarly modern mass psychological state that developed in response to the fractures, shocks, and discontinuities of urban culture. These theorists...