Many film historians point to Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell‘s Rose Hobart made in the year of 1935 as the beginning of the genre of found footage film. The film is a blue-tinted meditation on a little-known actress. 1Joseph Cornell was one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. He is famous for his box art and also a filmmaker influenced by the Surrealist and Dadaism. However, the public knew little about his reputation in the world of the avant-garde film during the years, and his filmology remains something faintly indecorous in the eyes of the art world. The reason is that he is not the traditional auteur in the forty-year history of the film since he put something in the film “box” just like he created the box art. Rose Hobart was premiere screened at Julien Levy Gallery in 1936. The film excerpted the actress Rose Hobart from a Hollywood B-movie East of Borneo (dir. George Melford, US, 1931). Through Cornell’s remaking, Rose Hobart shifted to a dreamlike surrealist experimental film rather than its original jungle schlock narrative. The film is framed object becomes not only East of Borneo and the actress Rose Hobart, but silent film and time itself. The actress wanders through a night-time dreamscape: many unexplained events, the sublime mystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince; but nothing ever gets going. All meanings are thwarted, and all linear narrative and causality are deliberately defied. Finally, he made the actress Rose Hobart like a flâneur wandering in a mysterious in the dark blue night.
Interestingly, several comments on YouTube said that Rose Hobart is just like a kind of fan-made video. Indeed, Cornell adopted the form of stargazing, but it is fundamentally different from the fan-made video nowadays. Next, the arguments from two respects will deliver on why the film became an art object rather than an ordinary short video.
On the one hand, he produced the film rooted in the particular atmosphere of Surrealism and Dadaism, not the idol worship in the mass media age. In the 1930s, the assemblage is in the air. According to Walter Benjamin, “artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult.” Here, the original “cult” of found footage film is from the Surrealists and Dadaism. From the artist circles to the critic circles, the burning topic on the art reproduction lasted for nearly twenty years; however, Joseph Cornell’s persistent years of passions on assemblage prompts him to become the first person on the field of found footage film. This could date back to 1910s, in the art fields, Marcel Duchamp practiced readymade art and created the first of his ‘readymades‘ in 1913 with his practical actions and works. The wave gradually swept the whole art circle and even rewrote the history of contemporary art. As a consequence, in the critic field, Walter Benjamin’s The Works of Art in the Mechanical Era was published in 1935. Until the film was screened in the Julian Levy Gallery, New York in 1936, the wind finally blew to film area in reality. Interestingly, Salvador Dali was also the audience there. He thought that Cornell stole his unconscious since he also had the idea to reassemble a film and wished that his work had come first. Before the film, the surrealists were already creating found footage films in their heads. André Breton writes about the strange method he and his wild friend Jacques Vaché had one year of movie hopping from one theatre to another in the town of Nantes: never seeing an entire film, they left whenever they were bored to rush off to another cinema. The critical elements of chance, disruption, and dislocation, and the refusal to accept the passive status of the spectator by actively creating their montage in their heads, already enacted specific Surrealist characteristics of found footage film.
On the other hand, the film is still fascinating through the time with its romantic, fairylike, marvellous, and supernatural scenes. From the time the film first shown in the gallery to it still shown on YouTube or the exhibition, Rose Hobart went through decades, and its exhibition value begins to display the cult value. Cornell produced the film in the form of stargazing similarly as the fan-made video in recent years, but his role shifted from the viewer to the filmmaker in the process of the making the collage film, and his self-consciousness during his watching made him stand out of the public viewers. For instance, Cornell’s diaries provide suggestive evidence that the artist saw the film as a public medium, a mode of expressing his humanism and of shifting his ethical capacities for care toward the incessant alternative of quotidian experience. 4 The receptive attitude from the filmmaker is quite different from the mass audience response. Although the film is a new art form, the screen is kind of like canvas in the traditional paintings — the difference in the reception. The traditional narrative film focus on the concentration make the public like absent-minded one, but the remake artwork offers the distraction. It forces the audience to ask why, how, and what during the watching action.
Reference:
1 Rony, F.T., 2003. The quick and the dead: surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: the turtlelike. Camera Obscura, 18(1), pp.129-155.
2 Shine, Mary-Beth. “That Old White Magic.” Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 2, 2000, pp. 116–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/778108.
3 Harbord, J., 2015. The Potency of Film Editing: Rose Hobart Stop Return. Contemporary Theatre Review, 25(1), pp.68-72.
4 Nieland, J., 2007. Archives of Modernist Cinephilia. Modernism/modernity, 14(2), pp.347-355.
5 Rony, F.T., 2003. The quick and the dead: surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: the turtlelike. Camera Obscura, 18(1), pp.129-155.
What's Inside the Box? 