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The Laws of Comparison: H. D. and Cinematic Formalism
- Modernism/modernity
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 18, Number 1, January 2011
- pp. 1-25
- 10.1353/mod.2011.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The influx of Russian film theory through the journal Close-Up (1927-1933) provided English audiences with their first glimpse of Russian Formalism, many of whose proponents, most notably Victor Shklovsky, had turned to film criticism and production in the early twenties. Drawing on H. D.'s review of a film written by Shklovsky and her essay on Carl Dreyer's Joan of Arc, this essay reads H. D.'s contributions to Close-Up in conjunction with her prose experiments, to identify a tension between her idealization of film as a universal language and her lingering anxiety that film restricts the creative agency of spectatorship.