According to sources, when Salvador Dali viewed Rose Hobart for the first time he leapt up and overturned the projector claiming that Joseph Cornell has stolen the idea from his subconscious. I wonder if in fact Salvador Dali had been lulled into the dream like quality of the movie and felt he had witnessed it before in his subconscious experience. For the experience of watching Rose Hobart, for me, was as if I was remembering a dream. The wonderful sense of mystery, the lack of connection between the scenes and the feeling of being in a murky underworld seems to be just like what we see in sleep, fluttering images of objects and experiences we have collected and stored from the day just passed.
Joseph Cornell created the film Rose Hobart from clips taken from his film East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle film. What results is a twenty minute short consisting almost entirely of images of Rose Hobart. Through his intent focus on Hobart, Cornell takes the viewer on a journey where the camera becomes a fans obsessive gaze. He focuses in on Rose Hobart and the camera fixates on her. She is beautiful, spell-binding and trapped within the camera. The focus on Hobart gives the audience a sense of ownership of her. She is mine, to gaze at and admire. Cornell’s techniques reminded me of the repetitive thoughts we can experience about a beautiful object we remember seeing and how we replay this over in our head to recapture the memory.
Cornell projects Rose Hobart through dark blue glass, giving the film an opaque quality and creating the murkiness of a hazy memory. The speed of projection is slower and the characters move as if suspended in time and place. Slow and ethereal Rose Hobart is languid and unhurried.
Cornell’s use of collage reinforces the film as something obscure and almost forgotten in the mind of the viewer. The viewer is transported into a mental state were they participate in the experience of dreaming. The film becomes a kaleidoscope of broken parts that together do not signify a whole. Instead when we see the pieces of the film it is as if we have forgotten the whole and are remembering only parts of it.
Interestingly the music, while in stark contrast to the slow timing of the projection, reinforces the broken and unconnected feel of this movie. Cornell apparently found the music in a Manhattan junk store. The music is repeated during the film and the audience is collective hypnotized by this repetition. Again we are lulled into a dream like state through this technique.
There are few scenes that do not feature Rose Hobart. These scenes reinforce the sense of the adoring watcher or star gazer. The solar eclipse and ball splashing into moonlit water reinforces the idea of looking to the heavens. Just as the opening scene depicts an audience actively doing this. These scenes draw attention to Rose Hobart as the star or heavenly body. The audience is taking part in an experience of star gazing at something dreamlike and wonderful.
When the film ended I was left with a feeling that I could not remember it all. The film also leaves you reflecting on Rose Hobart and her image haunted me for sometime afterwards.
