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The aim of this study is to demonstrate that 1930s French poetic realist cinema is characterised by a highly readable set design. It is a decor imbued with meaning - not a silent shell, standing detached from the action but rather the amplifier of narrative concerns. The thesis develops the claim that the decor is freighted with a powerful dramaturgical and symbolic charge, whereby the figural dimensions of everyday decor fragments anthropomorphise into powerful signifying elements. Stylised studio-bound spatial configurations define the film's visual ambience, enhance its emotional dimensions and function as amplifier of the story. In order to identify the importance of decor as an interpretative matrix of poetic realism, I shall show how poetic realist decor is the confluence of orthodox architectural practice, personal temperament and an appeal to popular memory. By examining the design practices of individual set designers, the thesis will provide evidence for the capacity for architecture to act as resonator of mental impact. The study will show how the set designer emotionalises architecture, investing it with a strong spatial, visual and performative presence. Although other critical studies of poetic realism have recognised the distinctiveness of the set design, they have not fully examined the architectural specificity of the films. The thesis contends that the director-designer collaboration sought to distil a visual concept from the thematic and psychological concerns of the screenplay. This interface between story and style will be demonstrated by a move from the general to the specific, looking at depictions of the city, a rhythmic recurrence of decor fragments and the micro-dimensions of the object. Ultimately, the set design and architectonics of poetic realism are performative in the sense that they can represent a discourse of their own, producing an engaging dialogue with more traditional modes of film performance.

The poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) published eleven essays on the cinema in the film journal Close Up between 1927 and 1929. This thesis analyses H.D.' s writing on film from a feminist perspective. It also explores the connections between her commentary on film and the feminist aspects of some of her fictional works. Largely based upon archival film research, this thesis incorporates a much greater amount of film history than has yet been brought to the study of H.D. Placing her within the cultural context of the time, it also represents the first extended examination of H.D. in relation to popular culture. The thesis is structured in three parts, each comprising two chapters and considering H.D.' s writings on film from a different viewpoint. In the first part, H.D.'s cultural position as a woman and film critic is debated. In assessing the impact of gender upon H.D.' s construction of a public, critical voice it is argued that the association of the feminine with popular forms of entertainment led H.D. to exaggerate her difference from the mass of cinema spectators. Evidence of H.D.' s contradictory position is found in the discrepancies between the highculture stance adopted in her film writing, and in the feminist themes and implied authorial positions in her novels Bid Me to Live (written in 1939) and Her (written in 1927). In the central section, H.D.' s critique of women in film is examined in the context of representations of women in silent cinema. Her commentary on film is found to contain astute remarks on the commodification of women on the screen, as well as a sophisticated and sustained attempt to theorize the position of the feminine in the visual economy, which bears comparison with contemporary feminist film scholarship. It is argued that H.D.'s feminist critique of the cinematic gaze re-emerges in the subversive narrative strategies of two novellas: Nights (1935) and 'Kora and Ka' (1935). In the third part, the focus narrows to analyse H.D.'s response to one particular film actress, namely Greta Garbo. The extent to which H.D. 's continuing re-evaluation of the cultural significance of the figure of Helen of Troy was inspired by Garbo's star image is deliberated. From the first encounter with Garbo's image on screen recorded in Close Up in 1927, to the meditations on a Garbo-like figure in The Usual Star (1934) and finally in the reworking of the myths of Helen in Helen in Egypt (1961) it is suggested that Garbo's screen career provided H.D. with a prototype on which to base increasingly complex ideas about women, narrative and identity. The strategy adopted in each section is to establish the feminist issues raised by H.D.' s essays on film, and then go on to explore these same issues as they arise in her fictional texts. Repeatedly, it is found that H.D.'s fictional work takes up a question treated with relative simplicity in Close Up and develops it into a complex meditation on the inter-relation between gender, power and art.

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