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.