NFR Project: 'Rose Hobart' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Rose Hobart’

Created by Joseph Cornell

1936

19 min.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was one of America’s most unique artists. Untrained and reclusive, he created art in his Queens basement. To be more precise, he created boxes – glassed-in assemblages of relatively small boxes composed of found objects and illustrations. They evoked yearning, melancholy, memory. They are still quite absorbing and alive as art works, utterly unlike anything else around.

Cornell would troll the second-hand stores, junk piles, used book shops, and random marketplaces of Manhattan for the small items he would collect and integrate into a visual piece. These are quiet, meditative works that summon up a comforting view, a Victorian wonder land where dolls, birds, keys, bones, pebbles, string, and maps conjoin in an exotic portrait of an imaginary universe.

Cornell made films as well. His first significant film was made without him ever touching a camera. He used to collect and show 16-millimeter films for his and his disabled brother’s amusement. He took a 1931 jungle melodrama, East of Borneo, and cut out everything irrelevant to him, retaining only footage highlighting the actress Rose Hobart, who plays the female lead in East of Borneo. This ode to the actress is Rose Hobart.

Cornell was an obsessive. Many times, he would idolize a woman from the movies, or from dance, or from history, and build boxes about her. He repeated this any times in his work. There is something voyeuristic, erotic, even masturbatory about the film. Cornell is engrossed in any view he can get of Hobart – in evening gowns, in plain dress, in men’s clothing, standing, sitting looking, reacting. Her place face, dark hair, and slender body obviously captivate the filmmaker.

He cut together footage of Hobart, rearranging the chronology of the film to suit himself. The result is a disconnected, non-narrative gem. We look, again and again, at Hobart’s face. The camera can’t tear itself away from her, and that gets us thinking about our complicity in looking. Hobart is objectified as an object of desire, but she is also elevated to the status of a wraithlike spirit, floating through the action like a dreamer.

Cornell accentuated the dreamlike feel of the film by slowing the projection of the film from 24 frames per second to 16 frames per second, by projecting it through a blue filter, and by adding Brazilian samba music in the background, which adds a kitschy counterpoint to the slow beauty of the film.

Cornell showed the film in 1936 at a gallery. Salvador Dali was in attendance, and he was so outraged by the film that he knocked the projector over halfway through the film. He claimed that Cornell had stolen his idea from his subconscious. As Cornell was shy and retiring, he took this interruption poorly, and did not show the film for decades after.

In 1968, Cornell donated the film to the Anthology Film Archives, which struck off black-and-white and purple-tinted copies. After that, the film became known in avant-garde circles. It is still a remarkable work of melancholic obsession.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Show Boat.