Observing the City: Dorothy Richardson and Her Film Criticism

Abstract

The coincidental development of the film industry and women's streetwalking in the early twentieth century cities had endowed ”the female spectator” with a double meaning. On the one hand, these earlier female cinema-goers are the very antecedents of ”the female spectator” haunting feminist film theories over recent decades. On the other hand, female ramblers consuming urban spectacles in the street of the early twentieth century are no less capable spectators of a volatile and multiply represented urban space. One of the first British female practitioners of stream-of-consciousness novel-writing, Dorothy Richardson is also a rambler and spectator in London of the 1920s and 1930s. For six years Richardson contributes regularly to Close Up, a film journal published between 1927 and 1933. In her column ”Continuous Performance,” a title suggesting the rapid flow and untiring display of the film’s images, Richardson, a critical spectator, comments on the socio-cultural aspects of film-watching and the aesthetical, technical innovations of film as an art form. That film-watching is an important cultural, metropolitan activity providing entertainment, civilization and cosmopolitan vision, and that filmic spectatorship is a complex interaction of the viewer, diegetic effects and the cinema as an alternative public space, are both persuasively argued by Richardson throughout her film criticism. Thus said, examining Richardson's comments on cinematic spectatorship in her long-ignored film criticism, this paper explores Richardson as a pioneering film critic to address cinema-viewing as a significant cultural, metropolitan, and perceptual activity, and women’s cinematic spectatorship as involving particularly gender, urban space, and female pleasure in the 1920s and 1930s.