with a few words on Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell. The first thing that struck me as I was watching the short film was the slowing down of the film speed and the effect this had in particular on the shot of an ambiguous mass hitting a large body of water. The vague dreaminess of the water undulating in the first powerful ripple, tinted bluish, requires concentration, as several times during the clip you could be forgiven for not being quite sure what you are looking at. It is this that makes the shot my favourite excerpt from Rose Hobart, as I am sure the original footage, undoctored and left at its original pace in East of Borneo, is quite uninspiringly and obviously a water splash, whereas Cornell has created something so surreal with only the most minor of alterations.
I would say that what makes Cornell’s Rose Hobart intriguing is its replication of the unconscious mind. He succeeds in his decomposition of the original narrative film East Of Borneo, restructuring it disjointedly in a fashion that does recall the processes of imagination, of juxtaposed images as thoughts, ideas, or memories. Yet, this ‘heterotopia’ still allows Cornell control over his examination of an unidentified consciousness, as he fixates over the image of Rose Hobart in repetition.
I felt when watching Cornell’s Rose Hobart not that I had entered a dream, but more that I had since awoken from one and was trying to remember it. The repeated snippets of celluloid, reconstructed in sequence without continuity of narrative or spoken word, are hazy blue as if to reflect the lack of clarity inherent in remembering imagined imagery. As the viewer of Rose Hobart tries in vague confusion to connect the clips to form some meaning of them, mocking and distractingly alongside them is a soundtrack that recalls nights spent passed out on the dance floor of a Florida retirement home on rowdy ‘Sao Paulo Saturday’. From this I would deduce that it is evident Cornell did not particularly want his viewers to feel ‘on the level’.
Finally, obvious connections to surrealism aside, I found the content of the footage of Rose Hobart to be reminiscent of the photographic art of Surrealist Man Ray; a connection not so obscure but owing to the timely fashion of the era of East of Borneo. The 1930s interest in Orientalism in a minimalistic Art Deco, fashionably Western style, is as evident in the strange pairing of the fair Rose Hobart with the intrepid wilderness of Indonesia as it is in the contrasting ‘Noire et Blanche’ (1926) by Man Ray:
