THE ECSTATIC ART
“The Madonna of the Rocks is not a picture. It is a window.”
— H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 1919
IT IS A RAINY DAY IN 1925. THE IMAGIST POET H.D. (née Hilda Doolittle) is living in a house with a group of friends in Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva. They decide to head into town to see a film they’re curious about, one which had been released recently in Germany: The Joyless Street, directed by G.W. Pabst. H.D. is excited to get a look at this newcomer named Greta Garbo, supposedly a great beauty. Before going into the theater, H.D. studies the poster. She notices that Garbo’s name is not blown up to signify her importance. The producer’s credit is the same font size as the names of the cast. This impresses H.D. She sits in the half-empty theater. Watching The Joyless Street, H.D. has what she describes later as her first “real revelation of the real art of the cinema.”
We know about this experience in such detail because she wrote about it vividly in one of her columns for the short-lived film magazine , founded by H.D., the novelist Bryher (née Annie Winifred Ellerman), and Kenneth Macpherson, a novelist, photographer, and filmmaker. The initially monthly magazine lasted from 1927 to 1933, with a steady roster of contributors from all disciplines: photographers, psychiatrists, poets. was the first journal to translate into English and publish Sergei Eisenstein’s essays on montage and cinematography, bringing Soviet films to a wider public. The magazine devoted itself to a few directors: Pabst and Eisenstein were its patron saints. H.D. wrote on Russian cinema, Conrad Veidt, Pabst’s , and, most famously—at least, it’s the only submission occasionally anthologized—an ambivalent review of Carl Dreyer’s . But it was that was her measuring stick: “G.W. Pabst was and
