ABSTRACT
H.D.'s role in the POOL Group and contributions to its endeavors in film criticism, published in the group's journal Close Up (1927–1933), or its experimentation with filmmaking have already been studied by modernist scholars. This exploration, however, addresses the influences on the poet's dramatic performance in POOL's film Borderline (1930) and her own interpretation and subversion of the images of onscreen femininity that she admires in her writings for Close Up. It draws on H.D.'s commentaries of the performances by the actresses Aleksandra Khokhlova and Greta Garbo, as well as the poet's overall opinions of film culture and experience of film spectatorship, in order to demonstrate the ways H.D.'s antagonist internalizes these dominant images of cinematic femininity and challenges the expectations about female performance enforced by the core film industries in America and Europe of the early 20th century.
