Rose Hobart

I wanted to revisit our first film, Joseph Cornell’s surrealist offering; Rose Hobart. Melissa suggested in today’s seminar that in the previous semesters she has taken this unit it had re-emerged as a topic of discussion throughout the course. I was surprised to find that this was the case; Surprised largely because I found it utterly unwatchable. The fifteen minutes cut from George Melford’s Hollywood Melodrama East of Borneo, throws linear time and causality to the wind. If Cornell has “removed the spine of East of Borneo” then he has only left behind an inexplicable, disordered puddle of overly-fetishistic, amour fou. I found myself physically uncomfortable in the screening and became increasingly uncomfortable and disoriented as shot after shot of the perpetually concerned Rose Hobart were repeated looking out windows or frowning at Princes.

In this sense it is a archetypal fanvid; enthralling for the infatuated fan and unwatchable to the general public. To illustrate my point, approximately 18% of General Hospital videos uploaded onto youtube are fanvids however they are the least viewed type of upload. What unites the fanvids of today, Andre Breton’s cinema hopping and Cornell’s synthetic criticism is their refusal to accept the passive status of the spectator. While I maintain that this is an awful film to watch I feel that Julien Levy, the New York gallery owner and first American champion of surrealism is accurate in his assessment of the importance of Cornell’s film. Rather than focusing on the absence of plot he draws on the “wealth of innuendo which accompanies each action” which he argues forms a richer emotional pattern than an audience is used to. This is true for the audience at “goofy newsreels program” screening in 1936 as well as for anyone who “stumbles across” a True Blood fanvid. What is critical in Cornell’s work is how he “affirms many of the cinematic codes” (such as the eye level shots to link shots). The juxtaposition of shots and subversion of the linear narrative does not make for an enjoyable watch but it was a successful film in terms of “introducing notions of distance and materiality that were hitherto absent from cinema”.

I had originally found the soundtrack to Rose Hobart extraneous. I had not noticed that the two samba tracks that score the film are themselves imperfect. In The Global Art of Found Footage Cinema Adrian Danks suggests that the crackles and pops in the recording imply its previous use. I found the music nauseating by the third loop and found myself anticipating each proceeding note with dread. Danks argues that the music at times adds to images, and while I would have to disagree, he goes on to discuss how the music functions equally as a counterpoint. The practice of using music to “create a mood or sensibility which flows with and operates in contrast to what is unfolding on the screen” has had implications in advertising and music video.