Rose Hobart

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-)}

I hate to pan a film that has been selected for placement on the National Film Registry, and I must confess my distaste for avant-garde films in general, which perhaps biased me towards a pan. But I got nothing from this film and couldn't wait for it to end. What did Joseph Cornell do merit any praise? None of the images were his. He re-edited portions of the film East of Borneo (1931) destroying any semblance of story. He projected it through blue-tinted glass. And he selected some samba music as background, again not his (although it's the best part of the movie). The result is a mishmash of meaningless images unconnected to itself or to the music. As bad as the movie East of Borneo was, I'd rather watch it than sit through this one again.

Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart was, is and will always be a remarkable film. It was amazingly ahead of its time, and there's still little produced since that equals it. If you have focus and trust in it, Rose Hobert will take you on an increadible emotional journey through anger, anxiety, concern, lust, dissolusionment and even severe complasensy.

Of course, the images are now Cornell's. Nor is the somba music. His found object aesthetic is, however, unmistakably written in bold lettering all over Rose Hobart. His juxtapositions, editing and choice of music seem at first random, cluttered and even a little sloppy. Yet soon new and complex meanings and messages emerge from these "random" scenes. Like the expressive face of its namesake, Rose Hobart is at once humerious, sexy and chilling.

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.

Footage selected from 'East of Borneo' and other films is arranged and edited so as to highlight actress Rose Hobart.

Joseph Cornell cut and re-edited the Universal film "East of Borneo" (1931) into one of America's most famous surrealist short films. Cornell was fascinated by the star of East of Borneo, an actress named Rose Hobart, and named his short film after her. The piece consists of snippets from East of Borneo combined with shots from a documentary film of an eclipse.

Salvador Dalí was in the audience, but halfway through the film, he knocked over the projector in a rage. "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made," he said. "I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it." Other versions of Dalí's accusation tend to the more poetic: "He stole it from my subconscious!" or even "He stole my dreams!" The Dali incident is interesting because when you think surreal, you think Dali or Bunuel, so this seems oddly appropriate. Even stranger is that this is now the way Rose Hobart is remembered. She had a long career, was a SAG official, wrote an autobiography... but if you look her up, you'll instead find this film. An odd tribute from an obsessed fan is her legacy.