Film Comment on Sylvia Plath the Moviegoer
In Sheila O'Malley's new "Present Tense" column for Film Comment, she reflects on the two-volume Letters of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (HarperCollins, 2017-18). "In the new edition, the letters to her mother are now printed in full, and the volume also includes, for the first time, letters she wrote to boyfriends, girlfriends, pen pals, editors, in-laws, giving a much fuller picture," writes O'Malley. More:
Plath’s unedited correspondence is filled with references to film. She saw The Tales of Hoffmann, Summertime (her comments counteract The Bell Jar’s “I hate Technicolor” with “a Technicolor Venice made me want to leave right away for Italy”); she saw Rashomon, she discovers Charlie Chaplin; she loves Jean Cocteau, particularly Orphée, and falls in love with Jean Marais after seeing La Belle et la Bête; she sees Citizen Kane for the first time in 1956 (“excellent photography”), she loves Hitchcock (“[The Lady Vanishes] had me jumping at shadows behind doors for a few days”); she hires a babysitter so she can see Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.
For the first time, Plath is revealed as an adventurous and voracious moviegoer. She lived in a very exciting era for film, coming of age in the 1950s. While the “football romances” were, indeed, depressing, the 1950s also saw the influx of foreign films onto American soil, Japanese, French, Swedish, Russian, with art houses proliferating, these movies providing glimpses into other cultures and new ways of seeing. Plath was an active participant in all of it, joining the Film Society while studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, sometimes seeing as many as three movies a day. Here is just a brief smattering of Plath’s copious commentary on movies in the unedited correspondence. This is all never-before-seen material.