A poet on film …

… The Ecstatic Art. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  H.D.’s film criticism, like her poetry, is always personal. She walks you through her experience. In her review of Lev Kuleshov’s 1926 silent film By the Law (which H.D. called Expiation), she starts with a description of getting to the theater. The car could not make it up the steep street, so she walked, reveling in the sunlight. Late for the show, she snuck into the balcony. Exhilarated by the bright life outside the theater, she was jolted into another world by the film: “I felt all my preparation of the extravagantly contrasting out of doors gay little street, was almost an ironical intention, someone, something ‘intended’ that I should grasp this, that some mind should receive this series of uncanny and almost psychic sensations in order to transmute them elsewhere; in order to translate them.”