In the Box: The [Re][Con][Figuration] of Rose Hobart

The thing, which stood out for me most when viewing Rose Hobart (1936), was Rose Hobart; or rather the director Joseph Cornell’s ostensible admiration and fascination of her. Like Anna May Wong in Piccadilly (1929), this film elevates its female lead to a realm of divinity, wherein she becomes a sort of sacred cinematic deity. The reason for Wong’s acclivity (in Piccadilly and in cinematic memory) is distinct; she was a Chinese-American actress working to give agency to her culturally stunted characters, meanwhile Hobart is aggrandised here for no other reason than because she can be.

Rose Hobart reflects Cornell’s obsession with Hobart, her cinematic body, gestures and identity. The film, through its intricate compilation process of finding discarded film reels and then cutting them together, alludes to the intensity of this obsession – Cornell’s fetishist desire to capture Hobart as Linda Randolph (from East of Borneo) in a certain way; to remember that screen performance as a separate entity, as being bigger than the film itself. This, of course, is very problematic as the performance essentially does not exist nor make sense without the film. How are we to appreciate Rose Hobart (as Linda) in Rose Hobart?

From the non-narrative aspect of the film through to watching her respond intently to the brief non-contextualised situations, it does feel like Hobart is being trapped in a box; ornamented.

But really, what is the point of all this Cornell? Are we supposed to marvel at Hobart’s performance in East of Borneo from this distorted excerpt? Because the Brazilian flavoured backing music does not embrace the image; it does not glamorise Hobart but rather disfigures her. Cornell maybe should’ve considered copying the style of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVcHbykiPSw&feature=related: a brief montage celebrating all the 68 women who have won Best Actress Oscars in 81 years. That video, like Rose Hobart, takes performances out of their original context and places them on another film reel, without the narrative but with atmospheric non-diegesis music – only this time, unlike Rose Hobart, it is conducive to the purpose of glamorisation.

Rose Hobart premiered in December 1936 at the Julian Levy Gallery. At the screening, Dali, apparently, became very agitated because Cornell had stolen the idea right out of his subconscious. Viewing this film does seem to have the effect of a dream – the way things don’t really make sense yet there is still a logical trajectory to their occurrence. The repetition of certain images, such as gestures that Hobart makes and the drop into the river, de-alienates the viewer from all the confusion of the film and emphasises a sense of familiarity and circularity; a sense that this strange nightmare will end. Ultimately though, Cornell has taken Hobart’s cinematic image and stripped it of a spine in order to reveal another element of the image. This other element is something that I still need to work out.