Super-retro modern: Eames, Mondrian and ambiguous space

‘This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour…’

Piet Mondrian, ‘Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art’

More than most houses, the Eames house seems an object first and a home second. A child’s toy, albeit of an inscrutable kind, placed on the ground among bushes. The Eames’ enthusiasm for toys reinforces this idea. Its proportions are oddly miniaturized; it is no larger than it needs to be. It has the curious property of making objects around it seem also toylike: trees, steps, a bicycle. House After Five Years, therefore, bears a skewed relation to the later Toccata for Toy Trains with its disorienting and hilarious world of giant miniatures.

The title of the work seems tinged with defensiveness. It seeks to address the question: Can anyone really live in such a fiercely modern design solution? Would they want to? We are reminded of Edith Farnsworth and the Mies van der Rohe debacle. In making the film the Eameses seem determined to show how homely and welcoming their version of the modernist box has become. Much is made of their collection of primitivist art; the height of fifties chic, and a ready-made subject for a photographer obsessed with pleasing patterns and repetition. Cups, plates and bowls are arranged with artful asymmetry. Oranges and croissants glow in the morning sun. If the shared professional status of Mr and Mrs Eames contained elements found threatening to the American mainstream (as suggested by their unintentionally hilarious NBC TV appearance) the mise-en-scene of their married life is reassuringly bourgeois. Look, they seem to say; we’re just like you. Only a lot cooler.

But the depiction of agreeable domesticity seems only one facet of the film. House is a photo-composition; a montage of stills. Dynamism in the film comes from the editing. You could expect a restful, pastoral rhythm to be chosen; but cutting in the early minutes of the film is rapid and somewhat disorienting. In terms of classical film technique, the avoidance of scene-setting master shots and rapid cutting between views with an ambiguous relation to each other is a method calculated to induce anxiety and foreboding in the viewer. Deep shots of the garden path in particular, and of closed or part-opened doors and windows have the effect of emphasising absence. House After Five Years is a strikingly empty film. If the intent is to suggest the carefree occupants have just stepped out for a moment (to get more croissants, perhaps), there is a weird ambiguity at work – almost between the shots, you might say, as in the mood evoked ‘between the lines’ of a novel. My Hollywood-conditioned imagination immediately began concocting scenarios in response to the ‘set up’ being presented to it. A body floating face down in a pool perhaps, Sunset Boulevard-style; or arranged artfully on the drive, like one of Warhol’s Crash pictures. All done in Antonioni-esque silence, for a funky fifties New Wave feel. I started hoping Marcello Mastroianni would appear, look around indifferently, and light a cigarette.

After reflection, I think the ambiguity of the film proceeds from the house itself. While the film seems to advertise warm domesticity, the hard-edged Mondrian-esque façade suggests an art object that is indifferent, possibly hostile, to human measures and needs. From the outside – trees and flowerbeds notwithstanding – the house begins to remind me of one of Donald Judd’s epic metal installations. Not meant to be used – just there. If this is entirely contrary to the intentions of the filmmakers, so be it. But I can’t help thinking that if David Lynch was asked to make a film of the same house, with the same title, it would be very similar indeed. 

Animal Nitrate: Screen Chemistry, Female Lethality

Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, 1929

In 1889 Kodak produced the first silver-nitrate film stock. In the early hand-cranked pictures of Griffith et al, faces flickered and shifted with variances in the crude machinery and the unstable material. You had to squint and concentrate to get a lock on what an actor looked like.

By the mid-twenties Kodak had worked out how to make the film ‘pan-chromatic’: no matter what you exposed it to, everything looked black and white. Even, consistent, predictable. With the new film came a new screen creature: floating, luminous, spectrally lit, lovingly and lingeringly photographed. The monochrome queen of the silver screen.

(Modern movies are all in colour. The superficial ‘naturalism’ suggested by colour helps obscure the utter artificiality of all movies. That’s why black and white is a truer cinema. Truer to what Barthes called ‘this festival of effects we call a film.’ Consistent with the dream-state of the theatre: a thing made of silver, captured on whirring plastic, the alien screen’s metallic inhabitant.)

Anna May Wong’s luminous face framed with its simple bob is the burning centre of Piccadilly and is the avatar that gives the film, with its cluttered archaisms of top hats and gas lights and ‘motor carriages,’ its firm claim to modernity. Her sleek form, her lithe body so present on screen - unobscured by daft furs and feathers a la Mabel – is the locus of desire for the film’s twitching males, their hollow-eyed faces leering from shadows as she performs in mocking ‘yellow yellowface.’ When she rides the bus among London’s huddled woollen masses, her bored feline gaze on the teeming street, she looks slightly like a junior Star Trek cadet who’s landed on the planet Hogarth.  

 Louise Brooks in Die Buchse Der Pandora,  1929.

A number of Piccadilly’s exterior sequences (foggy streets, railway arches, hunched figures in cloth caps) would quite literally intercut with G.W. Pabst’s Die Buchse der Pandora which also came out in 1929. Louise Brooks as Lulu is another silvery desire machine with a matching black bob and impish screen presence. Both actresses fled Hollywood to escape typecasting and find meaningful work; both were reputedly formidable intellects (Brooks was once spotted reading Schopenhauer in her trailer); both were pilloried for their liberal sexuality. Wong was accused of being Leni Riefenstahl’s lover; wonderful, horrible. Brooks really did sleep with Greta Garbo (perhaps the ultimate silver screen siren) and pronounced the encounter disappointing.

Wong in Piccadilly and Brooks in Pandora both ‘cinematize’ (is that a word?) the literary trope of lethal female beauty. By this I don’t just mean they update it: I mean that their animated silver masks, the sly glance that both women perfected, the almost drunken lust of the camera for their elusive forms, the shockingly modern contrast of their compact metallic bodies against the fin-de-siecle clutter that furnished the films of the twenties – that this represented a fearsome new creature of the cinema. The femme fatale, perfect, beautiful, destructive. Brooks in her memoir remarked of G.W. Pabst: ‘(He) was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.’

Michelle Reis (Li Jia Xin) in Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi), 1995. 

Piccadilly incorporates 19^th century style Orientalism to add ambivalence and fascination; Wong subverted that Orientalism via mockery while riding the Exotica train. There is a silver thread to be drawn from her to what became the cinema of Hong Kong: the ultimate liminal space of Orientalism, a theme park colonised by the West both literally and aesthetically, with its unique bastard film culture the glorious result. Its champion Wong Kar Wai, his Fallen Angels (1995) his hymn of male submission to feminine lethality. Wong deliberately cast non-actors (a pop singer, a model) chosen purely for their extreme beauty. When the diffident advances of the Agent (Michelle Reis, Miss Hong Kong 1988) are rejected by the Hitman (heart throb Leon Lai), she engineers his destruction. But plot is the last thing on Wong’s mind. This is not just a story with beautiful actors. Their beauty is the story. What ‘happens’ disappears, is obliterated by the sheer psychic force of the film’s lingering, dreamlike closeups of people doing nothing. This is the endpoint of the femme fatale evolution: film comes to a standstill, transfixed by the glory of the ineffable creature it has created. A.O. Scott could have been speaking of Sho Sho or of Lulu when he said of Wong Kar Wai: ‘Forget plot, forget story. The image is where all emotion, all memory, lies.’

(with apologies to Nirvana for stealing their cool song title.)

Notes: The Problem of Visual Modernity in The Fountainhead

Not a blog really. I thought I'd post my presentation notes in the fond hope they might be useful to someone writing on The Fountainhead. 

Sorry if the pictures don't work. 

Notes accompanying my visual presentation:

‘The Problem of Visual Modernity in The Fountainhead’

Rand’s hero Howard Roark and his work are clearly modelled on the champions of early 20^th century Modernist architecture. But the role of visual modernity in the film’s design is problematic, and seemingly conflicts at several levels with the film’s polemics.

I am interested in whether the tokens of modernist design in the film amount to ‘cinematic modernism’ or in fact represent a kind of schizophrenic archaism that is at the root of The Fountainhead.

I’d like to touch on the design milieu the film was born into, the trends surrounding it, other examples of didactic intent in the design of films, and the seeming contradictions in promotional materials that accompanied the film’s release.

Seeen strictly as a design exercise, what does the film try to say or be? I’ll argue its an unholy pastiche using symbols of modernity whose political implications are not understood by the writer.

Slide 1:  A publicity shot for The Fountainhead.

This image I feel epitomises the conflict at the heart of the film.

The Fountainhead sets out to be a manifesto for Modernist architecture. From the book: ‘They were drawings of buildings such as had never stood upon the face of the earth.’

This echoes the Bauhaus ethos of the early 20^th century which advocated a new architecture inspired by new materials, methods and possibilities. They embraced the ‘machine aesthetic’ of perfect reproduction… and welcomed what Frank Lloyd Wright called ‘the steam-cleaning’ of machine civilisation. Mies Van Der Rohe expressed the Modernist social agenda: design and technology to improve the lot of mankind – ‘if we succeed, then… social, economic and technical problems… will be readily solved.’

That’s modernist architecture in a nutshell. But this frame exemplifies Rand’s problem: an actor staring at a building like he doesn’t understand it.

Rand approaches 20^th century design with a 19^th century mindset. Modernism was integral with a program of social improvement. She ignores this.

Howard Roark is a cartoon of an architect. The building is a cartoon of Modernism. The film is a cartoon of life: it resembles no reality. And it was an anachronism on the day it opened – see the next slide…

Slide 2: The Farnsworth House, 1945, Mies Van Der Rohe

Icon of modernism, exemplar of the ‘form follows function’ imperative.

By the time of the film’s release, the battle for the new architecture had been fought and won. America was converted to the “International Style’ and clients were queuing up for it. The Farnsworth House had its detractors but was championed by the celebrity architects of the day: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.

This is one of the ways in which the book and film are ‘cartoonish.’ American architecture in fact was quick to embrace Modernism. Rand invents an enemy that isn’t there. The problem with the Ellsworth Tooheys who rail against all progress and advocate an architecture of endless reflexive classicism is that few such people ever existed. This is typical of Rand’s straw-man arguments.

Slide 3: The Chrysler Building, 1930

Built in the 20^th century but epitomises a 19^th century mindset. I’m showing this because I feel it far better represents the ideology of Rand and Roark compared to modernism. The gargoyles as shown here are modelled on the hood emblem of a 1929 Chrysler. The building is a monument to industrialism, the machine age and progress - BUT it was  built with masonry covering its steel structure, which is anathema to modernism with its commitment to ‘form follows function’ and ‘honesty of materials.’

Slide 4: Falling Waters (The Kaufmann Residence), 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright

This house was celebrated and admired from the day it was built. Built for a rich and progressive businessman, just like Wynand or Enright in the book.

Wright was Rand’s architect of choice to design the buildings for the film but Warner Brothers baulked at his $250K fee, much to her disgust. The job went to a young film set designer called Edward Carrere who did a remarkable job with miniatures, matte photography and back projection. He chose Alvar Aalto furniture for the interiors – ironically the height of fashion by the time of the film’s release, instead of being controversially new.

But – Carrere was not an architect. And his designs are cartoons of modernist buildings. He captures the look of mod architecture but does not have the training to understand how to make a building work.

Slide 5: Sketch for the Wynand Residence (film still)

No prizes for guessing what inspired this…

Rand insisted the character of Roark was not modelled on Wright but the film signals otherwise, since the buildng would be so instantly recognizable to American audiences. Again, Rand cartoonishly distorts history: Wright in fact had many willing and admiring clients but lost many commissions and made many enemies due to his vanity and egotism – little to do with conservative resistance.

Slide 6: The Enright Building (film still)

My favourite shot from the film. The building is beautiful – and unbuildable. It’s too skinny and would fall over. This gives the scene a fantasy feel somewhat akin to 1920s sci-fi films. It’s a beautiful painting by Carrere, though.

Again, by the time the book was written and the film made, buildings in this style were springing up all over New York, Chicago and elsewhere.

Specifically, this building looks almost exactly like a portion of one of Le Corbusier’s ‘Ideal City’ designs which had a very explicit statist/social engineering agenda – the polar opposite of Rand’s philosophy. Corbusier’s approach imported a French-Socialist ideology of the kind that is pilloried in Rand’s later Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Slide 7: Enright interior (film still)

2 themes I’d like to touch on in this image:

1.  The Corbusier ‘machine for living’ principle is echoed in this interior with its very clean lines and utilitarian furniture. See next slide: (8) Corbusier, Villa Savoye (1929). Once again, this was the height of fashion in the late 40s/early 50s and the style was so well known that it was lampooned by Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle (1958).

2.  The appearance of the ‘German Expressionist’ influence which was well established in Hollywood by the 1930s. The heavy chiaroscuro lighting, sloping ceiling, sharp angled shadows and generally exaggerated geometry were all familiar from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari onwards. Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder among others imported this style when they escaped Germany and moved to Hollywood. The skyline here is very Lang, Metropolis/M period. Few Hollywood directors of the time were not experimenting with the G-E aesthetic which had been popularized in the noir films of the 30s and 40s.

As many film scholars have chronicled, the noir/G-E style was very strongly associated with a highly cynical and fatalistic world view that is exemplified by the films of Billy Wilder, with their dark view of human nature. Fatalism and personal weakness as the determining factors of human destiny could not be much more opposed to Rand’s values. But they sure made the furniture look nice!

Slide 8:  Interior, Villa Savoye designed by Le Corbusier (1929).

Slide 9: Gary Cooper in futuristic Fountainhead interior (film still)

Gary Cooper looks suitably lost in this shot which recalls various futurist films of the 1920s/1930s, especially The Shape of Things to Come (1936, based on the H.G. Wells book) which I couldn’t find any stills from. Cooper looks like he’s wandered onto the wrong set and is looking for his horse.

Slide 10: Night of the Hunter (1955) (film still)

Extreme example of the German-Expressionist chiaroscuro look adopted wholesale by Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. This shot appears lifted almost straight from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Night of the Hunter is a film with a very scary, primitive view of humans, threat, evil, and danger which exemplifies the fatalistic style. The only film directed by Charles Laughton, it is a stunning work of cinema art and one of my favourite films.

Slide 11: Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937) (film still)

I wanted to touch on other Hollywood films that use architecture in a didactic way, to support or make a point. In Lost Horizon the architecural style is integral to a Utopian vision associated with values of purity and egalitarianism. The visitors are shown how a better society would be designed. Very clear Modernist agenda to the design in this film (as opposed to idealizing a quaint primitive village, which would be the obvious alternative).

Slide 12: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) (film still)

Here we see 19^th century-looking industrial architecture employed in a threatening overbearing mode that represents oppression and powerlessness. A kind of update of Dickens, it also prefigures Orwell. The left wing agenda to this film implied that wealth concentrated in powerful hands leads to oppression. Again, this is a 19^th politics that was rapidly going out of fashion as prosperity and standards of living grew in the West.

In this still we also see warlike aircraft symbolizing the machines associated with the horrors of World War 1 and its industrialized slaughter.

Slide 13: Metropolis (Osamu Tezuka, 2001)

A recent anime that updates the Lang vision, making the machine/buildings brilliantly clean and remote, but with a similar message of distant authority and consequent disempowerment to the man in the street.

Anime has a basic trope of the vulnerable defenceless human versus the machines built to control him. The world’s most industrialized country, Japan’s popular culture expresses a very particular type of schizophrenic trauma: It is the only nation to have suffered nuclear holocaust (the ultimate product of industrial rationalism) in actuality, as well as the permanent abstract threat of its possibility. From Godzilla via Akira to Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Japanese film expresses a corrosive anxiety about the hard-edged modernity the nation has irreversibly embraced.

Slide 14: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead

I wanted to look at this anachronistic poster as an example of Warner Bros caution and conservatism. This picture seems to have nothing to do with the subject matter of the film but reprises Gary Cooper’s strong-silent seducer type. Patricia Neal, meanwhile is depicted in traditional submissive mode. Introduced initially as ‘headstrong’ and ‘independent’ she finds happiness and peace only after submitting to an uncommunicative but dominant male (and exposing a suitable acreage of flesh).

Nothing new about that – but my point is how anti-modern these images and personas are. Not to mention the incongruity of the 47 year old Cooper as a twenty-something architecture student!

The story goes that Warner Bros wanted Humphrey Bogart for the role but Rand insisted on Cooper because his physical type fitted the role better: tall, serious, domineering. Interestingly, the symbolism of Roark’s red hair was abandoned (either irrelevant to a black-and-white movie or simply too difficult to cast!

Slide 15: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead

Cooper and Neal as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Pre-war throwback style in an almost-1950 movie! In some ways this is consistent with Rand’s femininity; her theme of surrender to a strong man as a woman’s ultimate desire. Hardly a modernist sentiment.

Possibly a case of Warner Bros covering all bases, including images to appeal to an older audience…

Slide 16: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead

Gary Cooper doing what he does best: wrestling a woman into submission. He looks much happier here.

Slide 17:  Lobby Poster for The Fountainhead

I’m interested in the way this poster uses highly traditional pre-war melodrama poses for the characters then inserts an incongruous Modernist backdrop. Again, an example of studio conservatism that was probably a great frustration to Rand.

(I’ve avoided discussion of all the phallic symbolism in the film since its been gone over so many times, but it’s kind of hard to ignore in this image! )

Cooper holds a pencil to make him look smart. Patricia Neal’s neckline plunges as it does consistently throughout the film.

Concluding remarks

The Fountainhead is a curiosity: it boldly asserts the virtues of Modernism but contains many archaisms and appears to suffer from a kind of ideological schizophrenia. It attempts to mate 20^th century aesthetics with a virulently 19^th century worship of industrial rationalism, producing a film that is a weird visual and ideological amalgam.

The irony of our age is that nothing is more nostalgic than modernism. Rand, Vidor and the film itself all subscribe to what Lyotard called the ‘meta-narrative of rational consistent human progress’: a Utopian narrative de-legitimized by the horrors and upheavals of the 20^th Century.

The buildings and interiors of The Fountainhead, intended as emphases and exclamation marks to stun and dazzle us and ram home an inspiring vision of the future, have become as quaint and nostalgic as the film itself.

References and sources:

Jencks, Charles ‘The Language of Postmodern Architecture’ (New York, Rizzoli, 1991)

Jencks, Charles ‘The Postmodern Reader’ (London, St Martin’s Press, 1995)

Whitford, Frank ‘Bauhaus’ (London, Thames & Hudson, 1994)

Spaeth, David ‘Mies Van Der Rohe’ (New York, Rizzoli, 1988)

Dickens, Homer ‘The Films of Gary Cooper’ (Chicago, Citadel, 1983)

Senses of Cinema: King Vidor by Dan Callahan at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/vidor/

cinemastyle.blogspot.com/FountainheadStyle

noir.net

Wikipedia

imdb.com

youtube.com

The Man That’s a Movie Camera: Vertov and the birth of auteur celebrity

Alexander Graf holds that Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera represents the maturity of the city-symphony ‘genre’ with its emphasis on ‘rhythmic and associative montage as a formal device’. In contrast to Ruttman’s Berlin and Strand & Sheeler’s Manhatta, however, Vertov’s subject is not the city at all. As the title makes clear, his subject is himself.

Vertov’s era was seeing the invention of the auteur: Griffith, Eisenstein, Jean Vigo. Filmmakers were transitioning from tradesmen to celebrity artists. Vertov fancied some of that action I think. He borrows many of the city-symphony elements – the dawn-to-dusk format, the austere compositions of industrial landscapes, the suggestion of ‘social comment’ (a stooping street woman intercut with a giggling bourgeoise getting her hair done) – but his real preoccupation is the business of collecting the images, and the opportunities for madcap hi jinks and apparent heroism this collecting provides.

Vertov shows his true colours early on. A steam train approaches, promising Ruttman-esque opportunities for flying sequences of flashing windows (a seductive metaphor for film itself), thundering machinery, striding patterns of reflected light, and so on. But Vertov’s subject is the crouching daredevil hurriedly positioning his camera in the monster’s path. We see him leap out of the way at the last minute; we see his delighted assistants haul him to safety. We hear the first intimations of the auteurist cult, the prototype of the Peckinpahs and the Scorseses: the filmmaker as boundary-rider and thrilling outlaw.

Later, the tripod-toting hero rides insouciantly in an open-topped car through the teeming streets, his hair blowing in the wind, his face lifted to the sun. A Soviet-Constructivist version of the conquering Aryan ubermensch. He clambers up the side of a perilous tower while onlookers point and gasp. A rhythmic sequence of workers flying up and down in elevator shafts (strongly reminiscent of Metropolis) is interrupted by Vertov who appears on a landing, grinning and waving the action on like Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now. I wildly expected an intertitle to appear: Vertov shouting at his actors, ‘Keep going! Don’t look at the camera!’ Channelling Coppola down the decades.

The swirling, surging crowd-vortices of Griffith – one of the ‘herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags’ as described in Vertov’s outrageously disingenuous polemic, ‘Kino’ – are massively apparent in MWAMC. Meanwhile, he condemns the theatrical tendency in film as ‘leprous’ and ‘mortally dangerous’ but is unable to escape its influence: as soon as the sweating flesh of workers is seen in proximity to spinning machines and pitiless metal, the human drama of personal effort and individual survival asserts itself. Eisenstein similarly tried to escape the tyranny of the particular in Strike, and failed for the same reasons. To the eternal frustration of the idealogue, film unswervingly reinforces the same truth: the political is the personal. ‘We temporarily exclude Man as a subject for Film,’ Vertov declares loftily. But guess what: you just can’t.

Vertov evolves the Constructivist dream into a Futurist nightmare. He channels Marinetti: ‘Our path leads through the poetry of machines to the perfect electric man.’ And further: ‘We compose… epics of electric power plants and flame.’ The Italian vision immolated in its own orgasmic coming-true: the inferno of World War 1. The Soviet vision ground on for another generation or two. But just like Eisenstein’s, Vertov’s leaden agenda cannot extinguish the life that film always eagerly, hungrily seizes and holds fast to: the vital universe of the human. Vertov’s straining labourers, his frowning clerks, his leaping gymnasts and wide eyed children, the chattering classes in the street with their faces catching the sun – these are the life of the film and the reason to watch it, to feel that 20^th century moment of excitement and uncertainty, to notice the universality of human experience that film wonderfully captures, and to ignore the cringeworthy ideology that tries and fails to ‘contextualize,’ hobble and delimit it.

Especially during the ‘gymnasts on the beach’ sequence - all that gleeful speeding up and slowing down intercut with the wondering and delighted faces of onlookers – I felt Vertov had film students in mind for his ultimate audience. The film could be subtitled Cool Stuff you can do with a Movie Camera. Watch this, he seems to say: I can stop this guy then make him go backwards. In explicit analogy he intercuts optical trick sequences with a fairground magician; all flair and flourish. He toys with stop-motion animation, making his trusty tripod dance and bow while a theatre-bound audience claps in delight. Vertov rifles through the cinema’s gleaming new box of tricks and brandishes his discoveries. Watch this, he cries. And this!

To 21^st century eyes it looks a little juvenile. But no-one had ever manipulated time like that before. Our sheer familiarity with the movies obscures their fundamental miracle: we are revisiting the past, replaying it at our convenience. Films make a loop out of life itself. Nothing else does that. 

Rose Hobart - Cornell's Little Box of Horrors

A 21st century college class watches 'Rose Hobart' unfold bluishly on the screen with respectful bafflement. To the surreal intent of the filmmaker is added another layer of disruption: our perplexity at the archaic method of silent film. Joseph Cornell made RH in 1936, by which time cinema had already rocketed to its first plateau of sophistication - even lighting, motorized film, seamless cutting, and the marvel of synchronized sound. But Cornell closets us awkwardly with the infant cinema: flickering light, jerky film, errant cutting, and that dreamlike silence which a musical soundtrack does not break or bury but strangely amplifies. Among the barrage of unfamiliar sensations provoked in us by a screening of RH, the first and fiercest is the sense of distance. 

Bryan Frye argues that Cornell kept the European Surrealists at arms length; but RH took me straight to that milieu from its opening frames. Rose Hobart herself dramatically resembles Dali's own muse, the volcanic Gala. Cornell's appropriation of the 'Jungle Movie' genre reflects the Dadaists' enthusiasm for mad juxtapositions (a basic technique of Surrealism) and for threateningly anthropomorphic creatures like the film's alarming monkey. And most strikingly, the lunar eclipse that merges with a slow-motion capture of rippling water simply has to be a reference to Bunuel's 'Un Chien Andalou' of 1929 with its legendary sliced eyball shot that morphs into a remote and razored moon. That film is suffused with a suggested sexuality that takes the form of casually violent invasions of the body, observed with a kind of bland indifference mirrored by multiple shots of Rose Hobart as she watches: the water, the moon, the erupting volcano, the glaring savages in the darkness, and the leering ‘Prince of Marudu’ – the modest figure of the actress surrounded by various more or less suggestive symbols of sensuality, attack or invasion.

But the most pervasive presence hovering over Rose Hobart is the gaze of the artist himself, as he perambulates his milky-white doll along mysterious corridors and watches her face register unnamed discoveries. Much has been made of RH’s opening shot: a slow dolly-in to a three-sided room where Rose lies tossing restlessly, trapped like the dolls of his famous tchochkes in a jewelled but nightmarish ‘box.’ The shot reminded me more of Duchamp’s ‘Etant Donnees’ (1946-66) where the viewer looks through a keyhole in a door onto a tiny diorama in which a naked woman lies spreadeagled in a field, apparently in the final stages of sexual ravishment and availability. Where Duchamp is confrontational, Cornell is restrained; but his living doll evinces a similar helplessness.

Classical cinema disguises its own fundamental elements under the cloak of ‘plot’ and teleological narrative. Strip those away, as Cornell has done, and you are left with what cinema is actually assembled from – that is, the photographed person inhabiting its object-states: lover, dreamer, mother, watcher, sensuous animal, and arrested sex machine. I believe it’s this correspondence to essential, unchanging universal concepts of the self that gives movies – good, bad, indifferent - their continous fascination for us all. We love movement, we love threat; we love watching the play of electric light on defenceless flesh. It’s the perennial, secret life of the cinema.