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.