Lynda Bundtzen contextualizes Plath’s poetry with auteur cinema, the influx of principally European films into the American art house theatres in the 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on Plath’s known viewings of films by Bunuel, Cocteau, Fellini, Bergman and Resnai, Bundtzen shows how Plath uses her writing to respond critically and emotionally to a cinema that is designed to showcase experimentation. Bundtzen focuses on the often surreal elements of Plath’s imagery and the theatrical confrontations in poems share the same experimental bravery of the directors whose work Plath so admired.