‘The real English film for which so many are waiting’: so Bryher described Pilgrimage in 1931. Films made in England at the time were often cinematic translations of literary texts. Pilgrimage, however, was never to make it on to celluloid. Instead, the novel was imprinted by this newer medium.

In the pages of Close Up, an avant-garde journal on ‘Film as an Art’ which charted the sudden decline of silent film and the advent of the ‘talkies’ between 1927 and 1933, Richardson wrote alongside Bryher, H.D., and the film-makers Kenneth Macpherson and the path-breaking Sergei Eisenstein among others – about the experience of going to the movies. Her tastes were broad – from Westerns and melodramas to the German expressionist films of a decade before, still showing in repertory film theatres like the Avenue Pavilion on London's Shaftesbury Avenue. Here in film she argued, was to be found that sense of distance so lacking in a modern environment which ‘pressed so close’, in Benjamin's words. ‘In this single, simple factor rests the whole power of the film: the reduction, or elevation of the observer to the condition that is essential to perfect contemplation’ (CU8 185).

In her columns, running under the title ‘Continuous Performance’ (a reference to the back-to-back screening of films which the viewer could enter and leave at will, much as the reader of Pilgrimage was encouraged to begin at any point), Richardson rarely mentions specific films. Her articles are oddly abstracted meditations, almost parables, on the potentialities opened up by the new medium: its effects on literature, on a wider culture, and on the existential experience available to generations who could now never know a world without pictures.