Joseph Cornell | Rose Hobart / 1936

standing by while waiting to escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Cornell (director) Rose Hobart / 1936

 

    Cornell, as has been reported numerous times, lived a life separate from most fellow artists—although he did keep in touch with several important artists throughout his life and cannot truly be characterized as an “outsider” artist, particularly since he knew well the works of Max Ernst, René Magritte, Kurt Schwitters and others—residing on Utopia Boulevard in Flushing, Queens, where he cared for his mother and his brother Robert who, having cerebral palsy. was paralyzed. Cornell remained in basic isolation until his death in 1972.

      He is best known, of course, for his personal miniature boxes, collaged with materials from magazines and records, photographs, toys, and souvenir ephemera, which were stored in a disconnected refrigerator. In 1929 he also began to work on paper collages, displaying them in a show at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. He also became fascinated with dance and film, seeing as much dance as possible and simply imagining it when it became too emotionally difficult to attend performances; he also collected novelty films, comedies, and works of several early directors including the works by D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, Louis Feuillade, and others. He also found and purchased an old print of George Melford’s East of Borneo, falling in love with the film’s actor Rose Hobart.

      Although most of Cornell’s love objects were women—and he developed a deep, even what has been described as “passionate” relationship with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama when she lived in New York City in the 1960s, which continued even when she returned to Japan with an extensive correspondence between the two—his loves where not of the physical kind. Indeed, I think we have to perceive the numerous shrines to male poets, the many female ballet dancers present and past, and his obsession with Rose Hobart as being something close to the kind of intense wall-postings of both male and female adolescents that represent a kind of fan-based obsession,  particularly related to the numerous gay male cacoëthes of divas and icons such as Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, and so many others as expressed in camp theater and film by such gay individuals as Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, Charles Ludlam, Andy Warhol, and John Waters.

       This is particularly so, I would argue, with Cornell’s 1936 film Rose Hobart, collaged from the film he had found of East of Borneo. Winnowing down the original 1931 film from its 76 minutes to only 19, Cornell, to quote critic Daniel Eagan:

 

“...Reduced the plot of East of Borneo to a series of erotic situations and gazes, turning an improbable jungle melodrama into a story of thwarted desire. Time and space no longer mattered, or made sense; characters remained ciphers; and the ‘story’ became whatever viewers thought about the people and settings they were seeing on screen.”  

     Tinted in blue in the first version, later in rose after the heroine’s name (I find the rose version far superior, but the blue color does further associate her more clearly with the standard image of the “blue boy,” the European notion of the sad gay young man) the actor of this film is seen mostly staring into a world that appears unbelievable to her, filled as it is by palm trees, strange moonlit nights (some of the film’s images were stolen from another film about a lunar eclipse), wild animals, and a volcano ready to explode at any moment. 

     She is often observed speaking to or having to listen to males (her husband and the Prince), but there is no romance and she appears removed from their attentions which often seem to take the appearance of arguments. Mostly she is locked away in a kind of palace world, frozen out of experience—reiterated by the several times she pulls on an overcoat during the jungle nights—as she appears to ponder what is happening around her and mostly wait, and wait, and wait perhaps for one of the males to make his move, for the volcano to erupt, and even a jaguar to attack.

    Even the monkey she obtains from a passing native, attends to her only while she holds it close. When she sits the monkey down to better pet it, it appears to fall asleep, she quietly removing the chain around its neck, apparently to let it run off free from any further embrace. 

      Throughout, even in the company of men, she seems alone and impenetrable, an outsider trapped in a world that has little to do with her. When in her room she takes up her purse, she seems not even to know what to put into it, or where any object she might desire to put into it is kept. Opening several bureau drawers, she finds a few handkerchiefs and in yet another drawer a gun, determining that it may not be a bad thing to carry with her, although she never has the opportunity in Cornell’s film to use it.

    The men battle others, order servants about, serve up grand tables of food, but Rose Hobart, set against an even more alien musical score by Nesto Amaral and his Orchestra from Holiday in Brazil, appears never to have the opportunity to involve herself in any of it, her role apparently being only to stand, discretely drink the cocktails set in front of her, and listen. We recognize that what she is truly seeking is a way to escape from the world in which she has become imprisoned. Something will happen, it seems, if she only waits long enough. Something will break through the world keeping her from human contact. It is a role well known to almost any gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender being who can’t find another such as themselves in the world into which they are born or suddenly discover themselves. In her difference Rose Hobart stands terrifying alone, despite her fragile beauty.

     Feeling the way they do, such figures often take on far greater significance for others than their mere humanity. They become beings against which others stand (as we see in her scenes with her husband), objects of desire (as for the Prince), or figures simply to ignore as if they do not exist (as all the others who inhabit this strange world treat her); and as such, outsiders like Rose appear bigger than life, the very source of camp expression that those who attempt to embrace or re-present them imitate. In their pain and isolation they are also fools, something to be made fun of, silly beings of no use in the environment in which they are trapped, yet obviously another aspect of their allure and adoration. The foolish outsider is what nearly every gay man has felt himself to be since he has first become aware of his environment.

      Cornell does not fully explore these issues. He is fascinated simply with the erotic displacement, the sense of being positioned next to nearly unrecognizable objects and figures that Rose hints of in her forlorn moments, the very expression that is at the heart of all Cornell icons.

      However, because the artist does not fully explore his own subconscious desires, but simply openly expresses them, there is also in his boxed-up shrines and in this film as well what James Fenton has described as something that even his most devoted admirers “must sometimes turn away from a certain shadow box wishing they had not seen in it, or experience acute anxiety in seeing one of his short films.” Audrey Hepburn, Fenton remarks, returned the box Cornell made for her. And in that sense Cornell remains a sort of unschooled innocent, without the full ability to comprehend where precisely his surrealist-like collages have taken him. A little bit like Henry Darger, Cornell, metaphorically speaking, does not seem to realize that his lovely Rose does not have a penis.

      Evidently, when he first showed Rose Hobart to an audience at the Julien Levy Gallery, fellow artist Salvador Dali intentionally kicked over the projector, complaining, in Eagan’s version of the story, “It isn’t that I could say Cornell stole my idea. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had.” Dali, unlike most of the rest of the audience, recognized the significance of what he had just seen.

      So startled was Cornell by Dali’s reaction that he stopped showing his films. Although Donald Windham wrote in The New York Times in 1980 that he did continue to show them to friends like Gypsy Rose Lee and Montgomery Clift, two gay friendly individuals obviously.

      Accordingly, even though we cannot directly argue that Cornell’s Rose Hobart is a LGBTQ-friendly movie, subconsciously it speaks the same language. It tells of gay desire without literally demonstrating it, the desire here simply being to “come out” by escaping like the monkey on the chain. 

     And fortunately, I am not the only one who noticed the affinity of Cornell’s obsession with the actor Rose Hobart with gay camp. In the early 1960s, Cornell’s films, particularly this one, began once more to be available for viewing, particularly under the request of Jonas Mekas. When in 1969 a print was made from the original, Cornell determined, once again, to tint it rose.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).