Enchantments by Marci Kwon

Author:Marci Kwon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

FIG. 4.18 Film still from Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936). Austrian Film Museum.

FIG. 4.19 Film still from Rose Hobart.

FIG. 4.20 Blue glass through which Cornell’s film Rose Hobart was projected. Anthology Film Archives, New York.

“Enchanted Wanderer” was not the first time Cornell had considered the transition from silence to sound and the role of women therein. The artist’s famed 1936 film, Rose Hobart, combined scenes from a 16-mm print of the 1931 B-movie East of Borneo with clips from scientific films, creating a nineteen-minute impressionistic tableaux focused on the eponymous actress (figs. 4.18, 4.19).56 As film theorist Annette Michelson has observed of Rose Hobart, “Silence is imposed upon a sound film, from whose found footage the sound track is eliminated: that silence is then reinforced, enveloped in another way by the substitution of an assertively rhythmical musical accompaniment.”57 Following Michelson, one could describe Rose Hobart as a silent film constructed from the materials of sound film. The enchantress Rose Hobart is key to this transformation. In a reverse of Portrait of Ondine, Cornell titled the film after the actress rather than her character, suggesting Hobart’s continuity with her fictional character. He also chose moments that highlight Hobart’s gestures and glances, whose expressiveness was due to her prior experience acting in silent films. At several moments in Cornell’s film, Hobart’s lips move but no sound emerges save the strains of Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil, which the artist requested as a musical accompaniment. Cornell’s use of an external soundtrack, intertitles, projection of the film through colored glass to conjure silent cinema’s blue-tinted film (a chromatic indication of night) (fig. 4.20), and stipulation that the film be displayed at the silent-movie speed of sixteen frames per second (anticipating Warhol’s strategy by thirty years) all accorded with the presentational conventions of silent film. With Hobart as his guide, Cornell excavates the persistent presence of silent film from within a newly noisy world.

Cornell’s text for “Enchanted Wanderer” likewise describes a moment when the 1941 talkie Come Live with Me suddenly becomes silent. Come Live with Me is the story of Johnny Jones, played by Lamarr, who enters into a marriage of convenience with penniless writer Bill Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, to save her from deportation back to Austria. The movie zooms from plot point to plot point until suddenly, near the end of the film, it becomes “luminously beautiful and imaginative with its nocturnal atmosphere and incandescence of fireflies, flashlights, and an aura of tone as rich as the silver screen can yield.”58 Here, Cornell describes the moment after Johnny and Bill share their first kiss on the porch outside Bill’s childhood home. The film follows Johnny as she retreats to her dim bedroom and turns out the lamp on her bedside table. With this, the scene plunges into a dramatic composition of light and shadow (fig. 4.21). “It is as though the camera had been presided over by so many apprentices of Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour to create for her this benevolent chiaroscuro,” Cornell writes.

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