SO LONG FAREWELL

STANLEY KUBRICK INSPIRED DAWSON TO GO TO FILM SCHOOL

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943) inspired a film version of the novel, both of which have inspired people to put together the Ayn Rand Institute. East of Borneo (1931) inspired Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936). The potential of the movie camera itself inspired Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929). The romantic magic that plays out in the sphere of the domestic on screen inspired Vanessa's own romantic and sexual fantasies. And Charles and Ray Eames inspired me to watch the Nanny Diaries (2007), instead of obscure, mind numbing, films as soon as I leave university forever.

The space of the cinema itself – all dark, and silent, and warm and private and public – inspires first dates and old dates and no dates. Sharing. At the drive in movies, it inspires 'heavy petting'. In the darkness of the theatre it inspires a stolen kiss. It inspires individuals to eat popcorn and go alone to a space, sit, watch, observe and absorb, and not feel lonely. When screened in a dark room at an adult shop, they inspire masturbation or emotional cheating while their wife sits on the couch at home fantasying about a Johnny Depp.

Once in a pub I met a boy. He had a twin sister. We talked a lot. We asked the bar staff for a pen. He wrote my phone number on a coaster. We talked and laughed and flirted and I stared at his ears; they were really pretty. We parted ways with a handshake. The cinema inspired me to run out of the pub and down the street, grab his shoulder, turn him around and kiss him – the cinema even inspired me how to kiss – and then run away again. I never did return his calls.

The cinema inspires me to soundtrack my life. With my iPod in my ears – when breaking up, flying away on an aeroplane, falling in love, people dying – I play a song as loud as I can, and let the tears drip down my face without wiping them off or let my body laugh with joy uncontrollably as the music plays.

Drama queen?

Todd Solondz and Ozu inspire the divine in the domestic space. Once something is put on the big screen it is hailed, justified and stamped with beauty – or ugliness - which is beauty.

'City Symphonies' inspire travel and adventure, and take the tedium out of train journeys. Tourism and living in the city. A drink at the pub. Wearing an old hat. They inspire travel for those that cannot travel, but don't make them sad, but happy.

Movies can inspire societal progression without even knowing it. Objectivism or even anti-racism, they can inspire those without a voice, to be able to sign their names into the history books, like Anna May Wong. Hell, Stanley Kubrick inspired Dawson to go to film school.

They inspire people to kill. Apparently.

They inspire people to obsess over the Pitts and Jolies and Clooneys and Brandos and immortalise the James Deans.

In sickness and in health and in marriage and in love and in comedy and in sadness and in hatred and in lust and in agony I shall honour thee cinema.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY...TO THE POWER OF '10'

I forgot that people learn about science.

Charles and Ray Eame's film Powers of 10 (1977) (here is just the first section of the film) literally sucked me into space (twice), threw me back down to earth (twice), pushed me deep under the surface (twice) and taught me a thing or two about the universe, film making and modernism.

I shall reflect on 10 random thoughts which materialised during my viewing:

1. QUESTIONS OF SCALE AND MISE EN SCENE: Scale and mise en scene have been a preoccupation in this course. I felt that this short film demonstrates the obvious notion, that when it comes to cinema, we can only see what is inside the frame. There is a world outside of the frame, and one deep under the camera's ability to focus. The image of the atom, and the image of the universe look the same - this ambiguity between the mind bogglingly big and the inconceivably small, gestures to the way that films can illustrate these similarities and provoke us to ponder such things.

2. CINEMA AS FORMULAIC: I began to think of notions of 'the formula' as the powers of 10 were recited as we journeyed out of the Earth's atmosphere. While the Eame's film was obviously supposed to be artistically educational, I read the powers of 10 as an extended metaphor for the ways in which we repeat and multiply filmic cliches. I squiggled on the image above of When Harry Met Sally (1989) because, the way the Eames film was repeated (see no. 7) with slight variations, reinforced the idea of cinematic repetition on a commercial scale. There is nothing particularly 'new' about calling Hollywood formulaic. What I think is interesting though, is the way in which we gravitate towards formula. I think there is something beautiful, safe and comforting about modernism and perhaps as a postmodernist society, we find solace in repetition and a knowledge that like one plus one equals two, Meg Ryan plus Tom Hanks equals love.

3. CINEMA AS EDUCATION/GRAND NARRATIVES: Modernism, rationality, repetition, hydrogen, helium, lithium and the Periodic Table. This mode of the educational video is one that is familiar to all of us. I found Powers of 10 an important edition to the study of cinematic modernism as it was a sobering reminder that film is not just about 'The Cinema'. The fact that this 'teaching' about the universe is playing out in a film, and that the 'teachings' are inherently modernist in their didactic purpose, demonstrates ways in which knowledges are created and transmitted. I've read that now the accurateness of the film is considered slightly off. But, only slightly. Obviously, there is not an educational film about how the world is flat, as cinema was not around. In saying this, I mean to draw attention to the idea that cinema and accurate scientific thought about the universe seem to emerge simultaneously in my historic understanding of things.

4. THE SIMPSONS: When this Eames piece began to play, I had the distinctly Burgin-ian feeling that I had seen this it somewhere before. I concluded, that it was highly similar to a lot of films I was made to watch in high school and that was probably where my feeling of deja vu came from. When wanting to watch the film myself at home, I typed Powers of 10 into YouTube, and surprisingly did not find the original version available, but The Simpsons version staring at me (which you can view here). It is almost a little obvious and banal to point out when The Simpsons steal from popular culture, as there are probably less books and films that have not been referenced on the show than those that have.

5. AUTHORITY: What struck me most hypnotically in The Powers of 10 was surprisingly not the images themselves or the bazaar music, but the deep, resonating male voice over. I associate this voice over with 1960s news readers, The Brady Bunch and a time when rationality, was not placed inside inverted commas aka 'rationality'.

6. MY PLACE IN SPACE: There is a book that my parents used to read to me as a child - My Place in Space (I can't remember who wrote it). Anything to do with images of stars, planets and rockets always brings me back to this book, and I always get the childhood feeling of being very, very small and non-important. This comes back to questions of scale also - child or adult, big or small, space always makes me feel tiny and stupid. Films have the ability to reach into your memory box.

7. BOREDOM:I found Charles and Ray Eame's films the most boring, tedious pieces of work I have sat through since Rocky (1976). To have to sit through two 'versions' of this film was excruciating (I never did watch any Rocky sequels). To be honest, I saw very little difference between the two so called versions. I think there is something to say for boredom and the cinematic experience. I began to reflect on the notion of walking out of a movie and wondered how often people do this? I've only walked out of the cinema once, and the film that I walked out of - What the Bleep Do We Know (2004) - was a little Eames-ish. I find the cinematic space one of entrapment. If you're in the movie theatre with somebody else, you need to whisper to each other and make a decision to walk out - it becomes a kerfuffle of an operation. Furthermore, there is the fact that you have payed for the experience and therefore you are somehow compelled to sit through it. I think cinema is coercive and often non-consensual.

8. INNER/OUTER SPACE: Interiors and exteriors have also been a reoccurring theme in the films that we've been watching. What I found interesting with this film, was that the Eame's did not seem interested with these notions at all. When it comes to interiors and exteriors, one must be interested in the surface of things to a certain extent i.e. the city scape, or inside someone's bathroom. However, in Powers of 10 there was a sense of extremes, of what lies above and beyond the surface. Instead of interior/exterior, we were presented with inner/outer space.

9. LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS: Perhaps it's my consumption of groupie and rock'n'roll biographies, but my vision of the late 1970s, when this film was produced, is clouded in a haze of hallucinogenic drugs. This film had a psychedelic element to it. I imagined drugged out film makers smoking and tripping, staring at the stars and wanting to capture it in a movie. I blocked out the daggy music, and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds became my soundtrack to the film. The Eame's seemed a bit straight and uptight through, judging by their chairs.

10. MAYBE I SHOULD STUDY SCIENCE NEXT YEAR: Modernity is about the rational, the true and the provable. I liked the way this film tickled a part of my brain that doesn't have a tendency to put inverted commas around everything ('rational', 'real', 'objective'). I decided that I'm not going to watch any more films in the unit.

Sorry Tokyo Story.

THICK SKINNED? "I WANT TO SUCK YOUR WISE BLOOD".

I like the word "cinomatograph". When I say it aloud, I hear Gary Oldman as Dracular whispering it into Mina's ear, in Bram Stoker's Dracular (1992) and I feel a movement under my skin, a shiver run slowly all the way down my spine almost as if he is breathing on my neck, not Mia's.

In an article by Anne Rutheford (at Sense of Cinema) entitled Cinema and the Embodied Affect she writes that "[c]inema is not only about telling a story; it's about creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator". She goes on to say, in relation to the affectation of cinema that:

Skin is indeed a pivotal concept here, If we take the metaphor of the epidermis as our model for spectatorship, how do we understand it? Is it a container, keeping in the subject and keeping the object out, on the other side? Is the spectator thick-skinned, impervious to the vibrations set up on the screen on all but the most blatant level, or is the skin permeable, a membrane that mediates a contact with the world, a tactile being in the world, that can respond to the flux of textures, of temperatures, can glow, can bristle and tremble, can even relinquish its boundaries in an osmosis of feeling and sensation?

I quote Rutherford's article, which outlines ways to understand the physicality of the cinematic experience – "embodied affect" as she calls it – at such length, for two main reasons, one personal and one practical. Firstly, her article had a profound affect on me, as it articulated and justified in an intellectual manner, the importance of theorising subjectivity, the body and cinema all in one. And, secondly because I think that this notion of "embodied affect" is an interesting way to consider Flannery O'Connor's 1949 novel Wise Blood in relation to the 'grotesque' and, in understanding her written text as inherently 'cinematic'.

Like everyone retains their own individual fingerprint, everyone's embodied reactions to texts are vastly different. I happen to be someone whom, up until until Wise Blood, have only cried twice and been deeply disturbed once (for those of you who studied American literature two years ago, you may recall the novel which disturbed me) by reading. However, when it comes to watching films I feel my emotions and my body react in such an intense and overwhelming way more often then not. Some may argue that it is my lack of imagination when reading books that cause this, but I think there is a case to be argued for something more.

When it came to my corporeal experience of Wise Blood I felt in my bones, just like I was watching a film. From Wise Blood's opening pages (as we explored in class) one is drawn into a filmic protagonist:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on a green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car (p. 3).

Like in a film (without voice-over) we only have what we can see at the surface; there is no psychology, no interior dialogue, no sense of motivation of character's actions. Unlike the grand psychological novel, which we're so accustomed to analysing, O'Connor strips us of psychology and gives us action – like a film.

My body shook most of the way through Wolf Creek (2005). And like this sensation, I felt an overwhelming feeling of disturbance and anxiety from this scene in Wise Blood. O'Connor writes:

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and the other arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was thrust forward as if he had to use his whole face to see it. He as about four feel from them but they seemed just under his eyes
'Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to – sick as he is?' Sabbath said. 'Ask him isn't he going to take you and me with him?'
The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at the squinting face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly, and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched the shriveled body and threw it against the wall. The head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust (p. 129).

When I got to the end of this bit I looked away from the pages of the book and then covered my eyes - the new jesus had exploded right before them. Like the time my friend and I watched Silence of the Lambs (1991) in early high school, and she screamed and brought her hands to her eyes – covering them so she didn't have to see the atrocities. Why did I cover my eyes after reading this passage? I think there is a case to be made here for the cinematic affectation provoked in this scene – so much so, I didn't know how else to react.

Reading this passage, I felt as Rutherford did, about a scene in Mizogunchi's film, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939); "I experience the shot in my stomach, as if my stomach turns over. It's this other, visceral dimension that, to me, an aesthetics of embodiment has to explain", she writes.

Much as been written about O'Conner and her treatment and exploration of the 'grotesque'. In Wise Blood it is the written 'grotesque' coupled with the sense the reader gets of "metonymic slippage between vision, the image, the eye and the 'I' of subjectivity" (Rutherford, italics added), which make reading her book feel like watching a rotten movie. What is meant by this "metonymic slippage" is the process by which a spectator (as opposed to a reader) of a filmic image slips in and out of identification with not only characters, but the explicitly visual environment on both an emotional and psychological level. Rutherford uses the example of an image of a cliff – when we see it, there is an emotional affectation in the sense that we are simultaneous placed at the cliff itself, as well as the physical feeling that we may get from falling of it. The instructional, descriptive, and bordering on technical way in which O'Connor writes evokes this same affectation.*

For this scene (I even find myself calling it a scene, opposed to a passage) like a film, it can only show us action, not psychology, and this is why it feels so filmic – I watch as Haze's hands move from his glass and chest, thrust forward as he grabs the new jesus by the head, I can imagine Sabbath's (Asa's) expression, and watch in slow motion as the dead body collapses into a huge cloud of dusk.

And my stomach turns.

Perhaps my skin is not very thick.

* This is not to say, that in books (or poetry for that matter) that are not 'cinematic', don't have this affected ability. If one reads the word 'cliff' it is possible to also react in this way. However, what is being argued here is about the process between the visually encompassing and embodied affect, and how this is played out in Wise Blood.

References:

Anne Rutherford, "Cinema and Embodied Affect" at, Sense of Cinema, Accessed here, Last Accessed: 11/10/2007.

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

ATTENTION VIEWERS

Attention viewers: the cinema is young.

Our course is called 'cinematic modernism', and to reiterate the obvious, this is because cinema and modernism go hand in hand. There is hardly something which we may call the cinematic baroque, cinematic classicism or even romanticism for that matter, in the sense that we refer to other forms of art, music, architecture and fashion.

To take a personal example, of the 'baby-face' of cinema, in my family there have only been three generations of cinema goers.
1. My Nonno (grandfather), who (with two rings in pocket, to make sure my Nonna (grandmother) had a choice) proposed to my Nonna in the movie cinema. My research has been unable to uncover exactly which film the proposal occurred after. In these days, it didn't seem to matter what the film was.
2. My parents, who went to drive in movie cinemas on balmy summer evenings.
3. And me, who when moving to Sydney took pleasure in attending the cinema by myself, as a gesture of (some sort of) coming of age.

I shall like to think of Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) as a 'birth' of sorts – like the short, memorable scene in his film – of medium and message; of the cinematic experience, cinema making itself and, of the "kino-eye". In short, the birth of both a manifesto, and the medium of film making, which, has the ability to lend itself to the very notion of the manifesto, for reasons, which I shall point out.


At the beginning of Vertov's film, he clearly states; "Attention Viewers: This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events". The film's use of experimental angles and 'random', absurdest, non-narrative visible events; such as a birth, a homeless man and a scene at the pub, where the camera man enters the beer; all combine to present us a piece of art, to muse upon the potential of cinema's "total separation from the language of literature and theatre".

It could be argued that it is the relatively 'newness' of the medium of cinema – even today – that lends itself to revolutionary, artistic purposes, more easily accepted than other mediums such as literature or music. Unlike a discordant sound in the middle of a Mozart work, or a symphony (such as that which accompanies Vertov's intentionally discordant work, was (and still is) able to be - what I'd like to call - 'comfortably revolutionary', as he was working with a new and malleable medium of cinema. Like Vertov's self conscious opening sequence where the camera captures the empty cinema fill up with people, we become reminded that even today there is something distinctly modern – and thus 'new' – about the cinematic experience.


At its most base, the notion of a 'manifesto' is a declaration of intentions and objectives for a certain object, thing or political party – in this case, it is the purpose of Vertov's film. As far as I believe, a manifesto is ultimately a Homo sapian construction and cinema, as Vertov presents it to us, demonstrates how naturally the camera simulates 'real human experience'. Unlike symphonies, theatre or poetry, the sensual and systematic behaviour of the camera has the potential to mimic 'the real', and go above and beyond it.

For Vertov, the "kino eye" is about occularity; the notion of the camera being fused to the eye of the man – they are one of the same machine; "our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man" [1]. Man With a Movie Camera was his manifesto for this idea.

I'd like to start by saying that if the baby, shown being born in Vertov's film, were born today, the chance that its first glimpse of this world being daddy with a movie camera, is quite probable. I think this raises interesting questions about "kino eye" and the inability to escape it in our day and age.

I'd like to consider questions about the potential inversion of the "kino eye" in our contemporary context. What happens, when it is man fused to camera not the other way around. As a culture we are not all at one with a movie camera, however what the eye of the camera has captured, becomes inescapable in our own experience of the world, hence its fusion to us. How may you or I ever imagine a city like New York, without envisaging what we've already seen at the movies? Will I ever look at the Eiffel Tower, but through the eyes of the many films I've seen before it? I've never been to Berlin, but Vertov takes me there in angels that I may or may not experience when I see it for myself. I will not be able to help but tilt my head this way and that when I go there – because the camera has taken me there first.

I think this sort of 'inversion' of the "kino eye" is especially relevant to our experiences of the modern day urban city - for they have become recurrent characters in themselves over the course of movie making.

But then again, if the camera and the man are one of the same machine, can we invert them in a 'postmodern' context?
Perhaps not.

Vertov writes:
Kinochesto is the art of organising the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object [2].

When I think back to my Nonno, proposing to my Nonna in an urban movie theatre all those years ago, I see the marriage proposal playing out rhythmically in black and white. I feel the beat of the credits of the romantic, black and white film, rolling over in the background, with their silhouettes shadowing the screen. Then I see a distinct frame beginning to form around them both, like they're in a movie too, and I'm watching them sitting in a cinema, just like the one in Vertov's film.

Except the man with a movie camera is an inescapable imaginary being in my head.

REFERENCES:

[1]Annette Michelson (Ed), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1984, p.8.
[2]Ibid, p. 8.

ANNA MAY (KING) WONG

With the absence of a monkey, ape or giant gorilla in Piccadilly (1929), I found myself turning to an analogy of the experience of silent cinema, with the image of the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' monkeys in mind, to compensate for this gaping hole. I especially found myself hovering over the 'speak no evil' monkey – for it seemed topical for a silent film, whose characters are mute of spoken word.

It is my up most intention to avoid any racist analogies in this post, at the same time as acknowledging the attitudes (not limited too, but) expressed by those such as Ernest Fenollosa in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium For Poetry. In 1918 He wrote: "The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it…master it or it will master us" [1]. With Fenollosa's comments in mind, I began thinking that although there is no King Kong to fear in Piccadilly, there is certainly an anxiety surrounding the 'other' in the form of a potential 'beast'.

No King Kong, but an Anna May Wong.

Besides the novelty of the rhyme, upon contemplation I discovered that Wong's analogous relationship to the King Kong (1933) gorilla, is quite interesting.

Wong, as both a Chinese actress and female Chinese lead (Shosho) in Piccadilly, literally and symbolically stomps – not over the exteriors of the city, like King Kong does in King Kong – but, all over the interior spaces and lives of the characters who inhabit Piccadilly, England 1929. It could even be said that she treads all over the film maker E. A. Dupont himself. Both Wong and Shosho become both a manifestation of the anxieties expressed by Fenollosa, as well as potentially triumphant over a particular form of hegemonic film making.

When saying that Wong as Shosho stomps all over the interiors of Piccadilly, dances in a distinctly Chinese, and hypnotic and sensual manner putting Mabel out of work and seducing Valentine, subsequently wreaking havoc with both these character's personal lives. I'm referring to her function as a character, and the series of literal and symbolic actions she carries out. Shosho calls the shots when it comes to her costumes, contract and love interests. The jealously and rivalry which she causes amongst the men and women who surround her, make her rise from the scullery both tragic and triumphant in relation to Piccadilly's interior digesis. Unlike King Kong, Shosho is small, dainty and obviously human – however her racial 'otherness', the fear of this otherness and the conquering nature of her very self, makes her the biggest beast in this film. Questions of scale aren't raised per see in Piccadilly, but scale in relation to the supposed potential of race, such as the Chinese at the time, are certainly present and are hauntingly echoed in the "master it or it will master us", mentioned previously.

In class Melissa drew attention to Anna May Wong's signage of her own Chinese name in the film, when Shosho signs the contract with the club. The presence of this calligraphic moment to me marks Wong's (not Shosho's) final destruction or conquest, over any potential hegemonic readings or implications that E. A. Dupont may have intended himself or that film critics might hail. Anny May Wong's lingering smirk is not necessarily Shosho's knowingness, but her own.

A few years later than Piccadilly, came Charles Chauvel's "Jungle Film" (if it may be called such) Uncivilised (1936). A film set close to home, where a lone white man 'Mara the White Chief' has lived his entire life with a tribe of Aborigines, but has managed to retain his 'civil white ways' (including wearing jeans). Beatrice Lynn, a white author (through a series of kidnapping and dramatic events) comes across him, and the adventures begin.

The reason I bring this film up in relation to Piccadilly, is that it is a sound film, not a silent film. When it comes to films of this period – at the threshold of silent and sound – a basic comparison of these two, made me return to my three wise monkeys. When watching Piccadilly, I really felt that the potential for agency, screen presence and subversive power was much stronger in silence than in sound for a Chinese actress such as Wong, during this time.

In Uncivilised the Aboriginal people are literally the monkeys – at one point they can be heard saying "ogga booga" (yes, ogga booga). Wong herself and as Shosho, which I've likened to having a King Kong like presence, is anything but a monkey. In fact in her final scrawl she makes her definitive, human and Chinese mark on the film. Wong's je ne sais quoi, would be lost in a spoken script dictated by white 1930s hegemonic discourse.

The choice of Dupont to film Piccadilly as a silent film, I believe works in favour of its sustainability within the body of work on cities of the time. Piccadilly could of potentially been seen – with a little more speaking and subsequently hearing – as Evil.

But, it becomes nothing of the kind.

References:

[1] Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry, San Fransisco, City Light Books, 1936, pp. 3-4.

SALVADOR DALI'S TANTRUM

The story goes that in 1936 the surrealist artist Salvador Dali attended Joseph Cornell's matinee screening of Rose Hobart (1936) at the Julian Levy Gallery:

Halfway through the film he began shouting 'Salaud!' - bastard - and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions…'My idea for a film is exactly that …I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it'[1].

Brian Fry aptly paraphrases Dali, noting that he was furious because it was as if Cornell had stolen the idea, (presumably for such a hypnotic, pastiche, bricolage, film), from his "subconscious" [2]. With this in mind, I want to consider Dali's tantrum as a text in which to understand what Victor Burgin calls in The Remembered Film, "cinematic heterotopia" [3].

Burgin writes that what we can understand as "cinematic heterotopia" is a cinematic experience that is "constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media and so on", he goes on to add that for him (unlike Foucault) "cinematic heterotopia" can also manifest itself in the "psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as 'a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness'" [4].

In other words, cinematic heterotopia is the way in which we experience fragments of a film within space before/after we watch it as a whole (or perhaps never watch it), as well as all those tangible and subconscious, cultural bits and pieces of cinematic references and otherwise, which inform our conscious and unconscious viewing experience.

We're watching the film, peering through a kaleidoscope of our life and other films and the film itself and experiences and our subconscious.

Obviously, Rose Hobart plays into the notion of "cinematic heterotopia" in the sense that it relies on fragments and images from the film East of Borneo (1931), however, I want to attempt to further pry open the term of "cinematic heterotopia" itself by taking into consideration some other elements.

While viewing Rose Hobart my immediate reaction to, what I'd like to describe as the hypnotic pastiche of the film, was in the space of extra-textual "cinematic heterotopia" - it was the form of the film, not so much the content, that seemed familiar. For me, Rose Hobart felt like an extended trailer for a Hollywood film – not East of Borneo (1931) – but another film, where Rose was the shimmering star (or moon) and the Monkey didn't face such a fate. Rose's lingering gaze indicated that the film as a whole would have a rather sensual and sexual tone. When watching the film, Rose would make you feel both invited and unwelcome in peering through the curtain into her vulnerabilities – of both the character she was playing, and her real self. This trailer was too long, lacked voice-over, a sense of a larger plot, and (if I may add rather crudely) colour, but had the structure, pace and overall sense of a film preview.

Upon reflection, my reaction to Rose Hobart, was an attempt at situating my uneasy state – caused by what Fry describes as Rose's "semi-suspension, turning the film [East of Borneo] into...a sort of box" [5] – into a more grounded, non-suspended and familiar idea of the possibility of narrative cinema and Rose's place in it. Unsatisfied with a box, I wanted to tear it open and believe that what I saw was only part of a whole, a preview – not The Whole, which Cornell composed it to be. While Rose Hobart draws on fragments of East of Borneo, there is a real sense that Cornell wants this film to be whole, even if it is hard to accept this as viewers.

The term "manifesto" has recently been the focus of discussion in this course. I wonder if it is possible perhaps to think about Cornell and a film such as Rose Hobart, and avant gardism as a movement, as a manifesto of sorts, against "cinematic heterotopia" in the sense that the avant garde attempted to present the completely unfamiliar, the uncomfortable and something literally vanguard. Cornell's manipulation of East of Borneo, does all it can to make any fragments which we may have experienced in the 'original' into a now unfamiliar encounter. In presenting experimental films, of which there are next to no reference points for, the audience is forced to watch the film without the kaleidoscope.

Despite this, Dali certainly felt differently.

Sitting in Fisher Library with Vanessa after watching Rose Hobart on my computer, and now stoically working my way through Jean Cocteau's film Le sang d'un poete (1930) I found myself distractedly – in the tradition of detourmount – glancing to the screen to my left, which was showing Blade Runner (1982). I tried to imagine the student was a young film maker, watching Blade Runner for the very first time, in the same way that Dali had watched Cornell's film at the Julian Levy Gallery that afternoon. I then pictured the boy picking up the television, raising it above his head and then smashing it as hard as he could against the library wall and shouting; "Riddley fucking Scott stole this from my subconscious" and/or "Go to hell Philip Dick you got inside my head".

Much to my disappointment the boy did not have a tantrum.

Maybe you and I and that boy are just a little more accustomed to staring through Baudelaire's kaleidoscope [6] than Dali was.

Works Cited:

[1] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart" at, Sense of Cinema, Accessed: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/17/hobart.html. Last Accessed: 6/8/07.

[2] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart".

[3] Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, p. 10.

[4] Ibid, p. 10.

[5] Brian Fry, "Rose Hobart", Emphasis added.

[6] Burgin (2004), p. 10.

Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart can be accessed here.