Joseph Cornell's, 'Rose Hobart'

Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealist film, Rose Hobart, dedicated to the star of East of Borneo was first shown as part of an art exhibition in which Dali is quoted as saying that it is as if Cornell had stolen the film from his unconscious. In its reliance on dream logic, repetition of images and music Cornell's film really echoed the famous 1928 surrealist film un chien andalou directed by Dali and written by Luis Buñuel. Commenting upon the associations of the moon with night, vision, the dream and the unconsicous, Dali's film features a notable scene of the moon interlaced by a woman having her left eye sliced horizontally by an unknown hand. Although perhaps not as shocking as un chien andalou, Cornell's layering of the repetitious music, deliberate slowing of the projection speed evokes the experience of one suspended in a dream state, encapsulating how one might cinematically represent the subconscious memory of the plethora of visual images we encounter in everyday life. As Victor Burgin's essay "the remembered cinema" suggests the repetition of images from cinema in our every consciousness or perhaps the scenes from East of Borneo in the montage such as when Rose Hobart moves towards the balcony enact what we may remember from popular media, they are fragments of images.

These carefully chosen, non linear sequence of images cut from the traditional jungle film, East of Borneo reflect mental process and the way memory, the consciousness and subconscious, carefully select images that we occasionally replay in our minds. Other moments in the film, when Cornell weaves in the image of people gazing up at the sky at the beginning of the film and then cuts to a clip from East of Borneo are akin to the distortions of one's own subjective experience in registering a particular memory. Slippages easily occur in the transition from the original text to the way we process visual information within the mental "interior", as Victor Burgin mentions in his article:


"These tend away from the causal linear progressions of secondary process thought towards the extremity of the dream - which, Freud emphasizes is to be understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary rebus....these residues are mental images." (Burgin, 14)

Box with image of Lauren Bacall

Bryan Frye's notion that the manner in which the screen of the film frames the actress, Rose Hobart is analogous to Cornell's boxes and can be contextualised within his penchant for making boxes dedicated to female actresses. Cornell seems to be seeking a dialogue between the actress for whom the work is intended and himself, the shots chosen inhabit a very active male voyeuristic gaze, particularly at the beginning as the camera moves so we see Rose lying on the bed, through a screen. The assemblage format of the film is almost like an archive of his obsession with Hobart, the clips for the piece carefully chosen by Cornell to evoke his creative idea for the film as a whole. As such his status as an isolated outsider artist, his insistence on the importance of childhood, is reminiscent of artists such as Henry Darger, who similarly through art sought to rearrange the world and recreate it from their perspective in a way thats very personal so much that we may never completely grasp the full resonance of its meaning.