Rose Hobart

An odd, dreamlike film cobbled together from bits and pieces of a 30s jungle-set melodrama (EAST OF BORNEO, I think) featuring the title actress. Like collage boxes that Cornell was famous for, it has a strangely haunting, yet elusive quality. Cornell strips away the original film's plot and dialogue, turning it into a fever-dream of hothouse exoticism, making even its obviously fake sets seem beautiful and mysterious.

Bathing his disjointed valentine to a homegrown, third string Marlene Dietrich in purple and slapping a spicy little rhumba to the soundtrack Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart can for some beg interpretation, others, be a waste of time.

Rose seems pensive (and naturally alluring) in most of the scenes with a variety of diverse studs in jump cut, her most relaxed moment spent with a monkey. Cornell clearly has a crush on this movie queen of indeterminate title as well. I'm not certain if it is Dada or a spoof on Dada but after two viewings can conclude, a waste of time.

This short film, (apparently made by cannibalizing George Melford's East of Borneo, also featuring Linda Randolph) hand tinted the used film stock red, or variations of red, pink, crimson, etc, has hilarious and serious moments throughout, and anticipates the editing and visual effects that Kenneth Anger and Chris Marker use later. While I am tempted to think that this film could be a sexy, campy, kitschy love letter to and about the films of Maya Deren, her work is a decade later, so Cornell must have come up with these "themes" and visuals himself. Quite an achievement. See it if you can and if anything by Anger, Marker, Brackhage and other avante garde film makers appeals to you, you may find this fascinating. Melford, by the way, made quite a name for himself with his 1921 film, The Sheik, starring Valentino, and his spanish language version of Dracula, from the same year as the Lugosi/Browning version, is actually supposed to be better! So Cornell was drawing from a "known" and interesting source.

A delightful experimental short, Rose Hobart takes a standard, five-year-old jungle flick called East of Borneo, cuts the sound, tints it purple, sets it to a jaunty samba, and disposes with almost anything that doesn't involve the titular actress. Quite possibly the first example of what I guess would be "found film", the cinematic equivalent to Duchamp, the deconstruction or distillation of something benign or otherwise into a completely different work of art.

The entire film is centered around Ms. Hobart, and as Cornell cuts between various sections of the film, sometimes in consecutive shots, it attains this sort of entrancing nonsense logic. She changes setting, she changes clothes, she changes peers, but she's always there, and if you avoid thinking about it exactly the way it is (it's a bunch of scenes spliced together), it becomes anything you want it to become. You can make up your own story, and the insistent aesthetics almost encourages random assumptions as she transcends time and space. Thanks to the purple tint and the delectable languidity the slow-motion affords, the entire enterprise becomes such a haunting dreamscape that even though nothing is really happening, you can't look away.

In this atmosphere, the ubiquitous samba music becomes mysterious, almost foreboding, as it happily bounces a long, a portent of doom for ol' Rose that, considering the film's unique chronology, literally COULD be right around the next corner, and not only would she never know it, but she'd probably be fine again by the time I drew another breath. Like Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son more than three decades later, Rose Hobart opens up a new reality within material that existed for completely different reasons. But if only Tom, Tom knew how to be so concise! The film is only 19 minutes, but it satisfies all, as we are seemingly experiencing things, not out of order, but at all times. For every scene that happens, I'm sure the subsequent and previous ones are happening just as well.

Such is the power of this little piece of something, nothing and everything that a simple hackjob so a guy can focus on some random chick instead of watching the movie she's in can make one feel...damn near omnipotent. Someone get me a copy of Honey with Jessica Alba on the double! Oh wait, I already have it. Oh, that's right. I haven't thought of it yet. Such is this.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-)}

This unusual and interesting experiment is a bit hard to categorize or even to describe. Edited together by Joseph Cornell entirely from preexisting footage, it doesn't really attempt to tell a story so much as to establish a mood (and/or an image) surrounding its star Rose Hobart. Her footage from "East of Borneo" makes up the bulk of the movie, supplemented by footage taken from some other sources.

Cornell clearly had great enthusiasm for the project, and he used some ingenuity in deciding how to piece everything together. Besides the main task of selecting and editing the footage, he used a filter to give the movie a distinctive purplish tint, adjusted the projection speed, and also chose a (seemingly incongruous) soundtrack. A different soundtrack might have given it an entirely different feel, although the samba music apparently gave it the tone that Cornell was looking for. The result is a very quirky movie that is pretty interesting despite some flaws.

It helps to watch it over again, because in so doing the overall pattern becomes clearer - not that you should expect it to make logical sense, but instead the more dreamlike unity of the collected footage begins to stand out. It is appropriate that the movie is named for Hobart, because her image is constantly on-screen, in a great variety of situations. Since there is never a story connection from one shot to the next, what you are left with is an increasing emphasis on Hobart herself, the various things she is doing, and how she seems to be feeling.

Overall, the movie might be more interesting than enjoyable, and it really is imaginative rather than masterful, but you won't see too many movies like this. It's worth seeing a couple of times, to take in everything that is going on.