Rose Hobart (Cornell, 1936)

Rose Hobart

Year: 1936

Dir: Joseph Cornell

"He stole it from my subconscious! He stole my dreams!"

For me the exclusion of Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealist masterpiece Rose Hobart from the original 1001 movies list is one of the more shocking and inexplicable snubs on the entire thing. Beyond the fact that this movie should be the first thing that comes to your mind when you're talking about American surrealism in film and one of the first when you're talking about the American avant-garde in general, there were a few somewhat more obscure (though not necessarily less deserving) films in the same vein that did make the list, e.g. Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic (1957), Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), Ken Jacobs' Blonde Cobra (1963), and, somewhat scandalously (for reasons which will become apparent), Salvador Dali's collaboration with Luis Bunuel; 1929's Un Chien Andalou. Now all of these films are great, some of them are even really great, but not a one of them is great in the way that Rose Hobart is. So when I realized that Cornell's magnum opus had been left off the original list, I was filled with part righteous indignation and part joy, because that meant that I got to write about the thing, which I will proceed to do...now.

Un Chien Andalou. No doy.

I think I'll probably start off most posts about how I don't want to give you a history lesson about (X, Y, or Z) and then immediately proceed to give you a history lesson about (X, Y, AND Z). Today's lesson? American surrealist film. Rose Hobart. Okay lesson over. Alright well maybe it's not quite that simple, but in a major way, Rose Hobart really is the the American surrealist film, and arguably the surrealist film full stop. On top of that, what Cornell did with the film in terms of how he created it was legitimately new and had never really been done in film before. More than anything, Cornell anticipated (rather than drew from) the ideas of other filmmakers who would come later (e.g. Maya Deren, the aforementioned Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, and even Stan Brakhage). However, don't think that just because Cornell was genuinely innovative I'm going to spare you any of the nitty gritty history of surrealism in America. If only you were so lucky. By 1936 (the year Rose Hobart was released), the US already had a long and rich tradition of avant-garde film, which, though I would love to, won't go into (though I will plug the fantastic DVD set “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941” which takes us up and through Rose Hobart in a remarkably thorough and enlightening tour of, well, early American avant-garde film). Surrealism, on the other hand, was still very nascent as a movement. Though it's hardly a clean break between the end of Dada and the beginning of Surrealism, it seems fair and (more importantly) convenient to tag 1924 as the beginning of Surrealism proper. This was the year that Andre Breton published the “Surrealist Manifesto,” founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began working on the first Surrealist journal La Revolution Surrealiste. So lots of stuff came together right around then.

The history of Surrealist film runs very roughly parallel to Surrealism's development overall. A lot of the filmmakers who had been working under the auspices of Dadaism (Duchamp, Hans Richter, Man Ray, etc.) did work that bled over into surrealism, which likely helped spur on individuals explicitly associated with the movement to move into film. This didn't take much doing, however, as the Surrealists were, from the very beginning, keen on film as a medium for expressing the Surrealist philosophy (the abolishment of interpretation in favor of unadulterated image, the pure operation of the senses and perception [as Breton called it “the disinterested play of thought], etc.). Specifically, the capacity of film to capture and impose upon its viewers a strange type of dreamlike state was a feature that was particularly attractive to the Surrealists. Antonin Artuad, the famous Surrealist writer, wrote extensively on film theory and the ways in which the medium could be utilized toward Surrealist ends, calling his idealized version of Surrealist film “raw cinema.” However, Artuad's only attempt at a proper Surrealist film, 1928's La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), for which he wrote the script (leaving the direction to the impressionist filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who shared many of the Surrealists philosophical aims despite not being explicitly associated with the movement), was, in his eyes, a failure and only represented a highly distorted version of his ideas. However, this film is still considered by many to be the first properly Surrealist film. The first successful (from a philosophical standpoint) Surrealist film wouldn't come until a year later, when established Surrealist painter Salvador Dali would team up with unknown filmmaker Luis Bunuel to create Un Chien Andalou, which was universally praised by the Surrealists and is still pretty much universally praised. I think we all know the story here; eye cut, weird stuff, free association, etc. Dali would go on to do his painting thing (though he will make a surprise appearance later in this particular tale) and Bunuel would go on to become one of the most respected filmmakers of all time, and one of the only true surrealist directors (especially in his next film, 1930's L'Âge d'Or).

So what was Joseph Cornell doing during all this philosophical and artistic upheaval in the mid to late 20's, you ask? Working as a door-to-door fabric salesman. This is not really surprising, as the still young Surrealist movement had yet to hit the United States (and arguably wouldn't do so until the influx of artistic asylum seekers [including Breton, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy] during WWII). Cornell's life was dedicated to his family, and specifically his invalid, palsy afflicted brother, and so he worked, not even really starting to make art until the early 30's (making Rose Hobart a fairly early work). Cornell's trademark pieces are his box assemblages, which he made out of, well, different kinds of boxes and various knick knacks that he found around old thrift shops and book stores in New York. This was very much in line with the Surrealist ideal of focusing on the raw image and utilizing incongruous juxtapositions to that end (though Cornell explicitly distanced himself from the Surrealists multiple times). As I mentioned, Rose Hobart represents one of Cornell's earlier works (he wouldn't “make it” till the late 40's, early 50's, after the Surrealist refugee invasion), and it follows his trademark style exactly. The 19 minute film was composed by Cornell from multiple found sources. The source that is featured most prominently in the film is footage from George Melford's 1931 film East of Borneo, which starred an actress named Rose Hobart (Melford was an established director by this time, having made a name for himself with 1921's The Sheik). Cornell had purchased a 16mm print of the film on a whim one day and became fascinated by its leading lady. The creation of the final version of the film as a work of art was not exactly deliberate, and only came about as Cornell slowly came to be infatuated with Rose. Originally, Cornell had only wanted to trim down the film so as to make repeated viewings less tedious for his brother, taking out unnecessary parts, rearranging certain scenes to make things more interesting, and inserting footage from other films (mainly nature documentaries, such as the footage of the eclipse that is seen in the film). Over time, Cornell began to develop something of an obsession with Rose, and the film eventually turned into merely a collection of all the scenes in the original film that included Hobart in them (interestingly, this was not the first such obsession of Cornell's, as he is said to have harbored similar feelings toward Lauren Bacall, as well as various ballet stars he saw perform).

It's not exactly clear how the film was first seen by anyone other than Cornell and his brother, but it eventually came to be included in a screening of some of Cornell's short film collection at Julian Levy's gallery in New York. When the film was screened, Cornell projected it through a blue plate of glass and slowed the projection speed some. He also removed the original soundtrack and replaced it with a pair of songs (“Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne") from Nestor Aramal's "Holiday in Brazil," a samba album that Cornell had also found in a thrift store, keeping with his assemblage aesthetic. This first screening, by sheer coincidence, happened to be taking place during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and none other than Salvador Dali just happened to be in the audience at Julian's that night. About halfway through the screening of the film, Dali leapt up in a violent rage and threw the projection screen to the ground. He began yelling about how Joseph Cornell had somehow stolen his idea for a film. Dali claimed that he had had the idea for a film exactly like Rose Hobart, but had never written it down or told anybody about it, eventually accusing Cornell of stealing his dreams. Rose Hobart had arrived, and, though Cornell, traumatized by the incident, would not show the film again until the 1960's, its mark had been left.

Salvador Dali: "Fuck you Joseph Cornell, you bitch."

Okay I'll start my discussion of the actual film by asking, does anybody else think Rose Hobart looks a little bit like Maggie Gyllenhaal? Eh? Anybody? Just a lil bit? Whatever.

Come ONNNNNNNNNNNNNNN Maggie=Rose!?

It is difficult to know where to begin with a film like this; the philosophical shell of Rose Hobart is fairly smooth and chink free, making entrance difficult. By “a film like this” what I mean is that it seems to me that much of the content of the film, that is to say, much of the meaning that can be derived from the film, is peripheral to the film itself. Indeed this is to be expected of any Surrealist film, insofar as the film attempts to force interpretation out in favor of pure image/experience, in the Surrealist tradition. So the content of the film (a collection of blue tinted scenes from an unknown jungle film set to samba music) cannot rightly be the focus of any analysis. Rather, we must (can) only keep the film on the edges of our analysis, focusing instead on the raw ideas that serve as the backdrop to that content. We cannot ask traditional film questions about characters, plot, themes, we are forced to examine things a bit more closely, and this, in my view, is what many of the Surrealists wanted in the first place; a new interrogation of reality (Surrealism was always conceived of as an explicitly revolutionary movement, working for change, etc.). Though we may have to work at a bit more, there is, as always, still a feast of meaning to be had here if we really start slicing and dicing.

I think it best to start at the top, i.e. the title, Rose Hobart. Maybe at first glance it seems that this is pretty straightforward. The film consists almost entirely of footage of Rose Hobart, Cornell was obsessed wither her, hence, Rose Hobart. “Why you gotta overanalyze everything guy?” Just hear me out k? I actually believe there is a lot going on here, much of it stuff that Cornell couldn't have done purposefully. First though, even if we take the sort of simplistic artist-and-muse interpretation, a few interesting things still pop up. I mean Cornell is basically prefiguring an entire cultural phenomenon decades in advance, namely the sort of strange fetishist subcultures that grew up around many movies stars during the 40's, 50's, and 60's (perhaps most notably James Dean). Think about all of the magazines and fan clubs that started up around these figures, and even more recently, the plethora of online communities dedicated to big stars. Cornell produced what is essentially the first fan tribute video. Furthermore, the way he did it, collecting and editing footage, coupling it with found music and objects (the blue glass) might just qualify as the very first mashup. I think that the ways in which Rose Hobart exhibits shades of much later cultural developments (including all the folks who totally aped its style in the 60's) is really interesting and is just more evidence of its ahead-of-its-time-ness.

Now you might be tempted to ask “Oh well what is so different about this artist-muse relationship? Why aren't much earlier artists who were inspired by beautiful women they knew the progenitors of today's creepily obsessed fan freaks? You're just pulling shit out of your ass aren't you?” Okay this is where it gets interesting. Clearly there were muses before Rose Hobart. The Greek muses of myth would be a good place to start and many artists and writers had specific women that they knew (e.g. Peter Abelard and Heloise, Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, The Pre-Raphaelites and Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke, etc.) who inspired their work. However, there seems to be something crucially different about Cornell's relationship with Rose Hobart that makes it more interesting than any of the other examples I just gave. First,with the Greek muses, any relationship that was had between them and an artist was completely mystical in nature. What I mean by this is that the muses were not discrete figures like any other person would be and they were not interacted with in the ways we interact with everyday people. Rather they were characters, mythic figures who (while they were believed in as one might believe in a God) were posited as having some influence on the world but who could never be picked out or positively identified. So in a sense these relationships were (I am assuming, hopefully not controversially, the non-existence of the actual Greek muses) entirely one sided, in the sense that the muses themselves were wholly fictitious and infinitely interpretable (with some very loose guidelines). On the other hand, the more traditional artist-muse relationships between discrete individuals on a personal level are exclusively corporeal in nature. These real, flesh and blood women, though certainly idealized to a certain degree by their devotees, could never truly escape to the fanciful heights of the Greek myths, being irrevocably anchored to this world by their humanity. Because of this, the relationship between them and those they inspired could, ultimately, never be anything more than an interaction (however complex) between two mortal human beings. What makes the Hobart-Cornell relationship more interesting (and more comparable to the digital idol worship of today) is the fact that, essentially, the figure of Rose Hobart was a hybridization of the classical Greek muses and the more traditional human muses. Obviously the actress Rose Hobart was a real, corporeal being that would live and die along with the rest, so in that respect she was like Salome or Heloise. However, for Cornell, she was also much closer to the Greek figures than any of the classical human muses were. This, essentially, is due to the fact that the only experience Cornell had of Hobart was totally mediate, coming through the medium of film (for me, I interpret Cornell's projecting of the film through a blue glass filter to be a subconscious acknowledgement of this impure, mediate nature of his experience of Hobart. So, in a beautiful sneak-attack, we could say that Cornell [who, again, distanced himself from Surrealism many times], in producing the most praised Surrealist film of all time, smuggled in the very antithesis of the Surrealist philosophy: pure images and disinterested thought are impossible, everything is mediate). Cornell never met Rose Hobart, never exchanged letters with her, never interacted with her personally in any way, and yet he had something more concrete than mythical stories and images, namely, actual film footage. In this way, Rose Hobart straddled the strange line between completely mythic and banally corporeal. Cornell both had the near infinite freedom to interpret his muse and her influences in the way that the Greeks did (but which, I would argue, Abelard or the Raphaelites did not), but also was driven by the classical obsessive fever of knowing that somewhere out in his very world, this figure really existed in some way. This is why it seems to me that the Hobart-Cornell relationship is much more a harbinger of your average obsessive fan today than any previous relationship could be. Take, for instance, your average Robert Pattinson-obsessed teenager today. Most of these people will, it seems to me, go through their entire lives without ever actually meeting Robert Pattinson or corresponding with him in a personal way. Their whole experience of Robert Pattinson will be no more than the sum of his media appearances, the posters on their walls, interviews, and his film performances (indeed, as with Rose Hobart, their experiences of Pattinson will be doubly mediated, first by the fact that all of their experiences will be indirect, and second by the inevitable blurring of on-screen character and actual person that occurs with all actors). For these people, their cobbled together personal vision of Robert Pattinson really is Robert Pattinson. Yes there may be some “real” figure out there to whom the name “Robert Pattinson” can be applied, but this figure is just mythical enough to serve only as the very roughest of guides as to what Robert Pattinson really is to them. This is exactly the situation with Rose Hobart. For Joseph Cornell, his vision of Rose Hobart as he concocted her in his film, really is the Rose Hobart.

You know my steez.

The implications of this particular type of muse relationship that Cornell is likely the first example of are, for me, profound. Let's think about this in terms of personal identity. I think that Cornell is really forcing the issue here (again presaging some of the most pressing questions of the digital age) of what exactly comes to count as a person now that we can all be digitally reproduced and altered to fit any image whatsoever. If we take my thesis that Cornell was presenting this film as the Rose Hobart, then the title of the film takes on a new and interesting meaning. We have now a bit of a conundrum set up, where there is a question about who/what the real Rose Hobart is. Is it the actress Rose Hobart, or is it Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (Rose Hobart without italics?)? This seems to me to be a real question. What is it about the actress Rose Hobart that gives her any more of a claim to being the real Rose Hobart than Cornell's creation? This question becomes even more complicated if we make the problem diachronic, taking into account the historical status of both Rose Hobarts. It strikes me that Cornell's film (which, remember, we are taking to be a contender for the proper name of Rose Hobart) has come to be significantly more well known than the actress which inspired it. When you mention the name “Rose Hobart” you are more than likely to induce thoughts of Cornell's film than of the actress. That is to say, whether we like it or not, Cornell's Rose Hobart seems to have come to take over the name “Rose Hobart” fully, making it as if the actress Rose Hobart is an afterthought of the film; or a shadow thereof, a person inspired by a film, rather than the other way around. Again I think Robert Pattinson is a fair comparison here, taking Cornell's probing questions to their logical extremes. In an age when there is more information about Robert Pattinson readily available to all people instantly on the internet than Robert Pattinson (the person) likely has stored about himself in his own mind, why should we feel compelled to point to the physical form and say “That, and only that, is the real Robert Pattinson.”? This seems pretty much entirely arbitrary to me. At best our physical forms are some small percentage of what accounts for us proper, with the majority of identity (it seems to me) being located elsewhere (memory, psychological data, influences on others, etc.), and today most of this other information about our identities exists out in the world in digital form (through facebook pages, twitter accounts, creepy GPS locating devices, blogs, etc.), and this becomes even more pronounced with famous people. Identity is dispersed and comes up for interpretation and, ultimately, re-appropriation at any time by anybody. This bundle of information is Robert Pattinson, this other bundle of the same information is Robert Pattinson, etc. etc. Which is the real Robert Pattinson? Or perhaps these are all a false choices, as somebody like Jean Baudrillard would have it. Baudrillard suggests that in this type of environment of infinite reproducibility and dispersion of identity, the entire concept of the “original” becomes totally meaningless, and we are left with copies of copies of copies without any original to point to. Everything is copy. We might interpret Cornell in this way too, not as offering an alternative to Rose Hobart, but just another Rose Hobart. This seems equally plausible, and equally challenging, to me. Either way, it seems clear that Rose Hobart is bringing up some serious issues about digital reproducibility, personal identity, and, really, the nature of celebrity, pretty much before anybody else was, so for that reason alone (and because it made Salvador Dali totally jealous), it should be on the list. Plus it's a damn enjoyable movie to watch. A friend once described it to me as the perfect distillation of what a film should be: just the pleasure of seeing. So that works too.

Okay that was shorter right? I hope you don't feel as if I skimped out. I could have talked about some other stuff (the music, the meaning of the inserted nature footage, etc.) or gone deeper into whether the film is Surrealist or not, but I really do think that the film does succeed (in the Surrealist tradition) in forcing those kind of direct interpretive analyses out the door, leaving us to focus on other stuff, which I think I did. I've heard those kinds of analyses of the film before and they always just sound hopelessly awkward. So maybe it is Surrealist in that way, though I think the stuff I pointed out about secret anti-Surrealist messages are very present in the film as well. Also, I hope the spacing/paragraphs are a little bit better.

As always, leave me a comment about what you think, how great I am, offering me jobs, asking why the fuck I was talking about Robert Pattinson so much, etc. I like this clip of like a post every 2-3 days, so I'll try to stick with that. Let me know what you think. Next up is probablyyyyyyyyy Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto, 1989), or Glen or Glenda? (Wood, 1953), or Whistle and I'll Come to You (Miller, 1968). How about this, YOU GUYS VOTE! Leave me a comment about which movie you want me to tackle next and I'll do that. If nobody votes, I'll kill myself and make this a Robert Pattinson blog. In that order. Like the new banner? No doy you do.

CU