Rose Hobart

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.

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.

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.

This is one of 50 films from the DVD collection "Treasures from American Film Archives (2000)". It is perhaps the strangest film as I have no idea why the film maker decided to string together all these clips of the actress Rose Hobart and then use a blue filter on them. Was he some sort of obsessed maniac or was this meant as an art film? And whose decision was it to include the bizarre and rather intense musical score? Was the original film maker or the folks at the film archive or the people who compiled the films for the collection? All I know is that the film was awfully weird and not one that the average person would enjoy. Plus, many of the clips are in very rough shape--making viewing a less than pleasurable experience.

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.