The cutting room experience?

1936: Hollywood jungle adventure film East of Borneo is pillaged and deformed in the cutting room of artist Joseph Cornell, celluloid fragments commandeered and repurposed into the 19-minute Rose Hobart. It’s an act of filmic breaking-and-entering, a breaching of borders and a violation of order, sense, sequence. East of Borneo is stripped of narrative line, muted and slowed in its transformation into a quasi-silent film, and tinged with a dreamy, nocturnal blue.

That all sounds a little violent…but after all, we do call it a cutting room.

Cornell’s film is a homage to Rose Hobart’s image and a meditation on the screen-bound female form, referencing adoration, fixation, obsession. The film expels distractions of character and plot development in illuminating the erotic function of the actress – projected upon the cinema screen, suspended above the audience, objectified under the gaze of popcorn-crunching spectators. She’s viewable, and vulnerable.

For me, watching the film felt unsettlingly voyeuristic. The camera’s eye dwells on the movements and contours of Rose’s body and face. It doggedly stalks her image, as if magnetised by it. It languishes. Occasionally other bodies float on and off the screen, apparitions appearing at the edges of the camera’s attention. They are merely brief and uninteresting interludes to the main attraction, like television ad breaks only half-watched.


Did I feel lost in reverie? Entrapped by the power of the image? Transfixed? I definitely felt numbed by the monotony of Cornell’s montage. But rather than an experience of wilful enrapture, the film produced in me a heightened sense of spectatorship – a self-conscious consideration of the affective pull of the image, not necessarily an experience of that pull.

Rose Hobart’s aleatoric, throw-of-the-dice aesthetics perform a revelatory function. I felt distanced from the film, never forgetfully immersed in the fantasy of the screen. I was always aware of the film as a film and of myself as a spectator, never becoming whisked away from our darkened classroom with its plush chairs and full bookshelves. I was outside the film, looking in at its strange bluish world with a sort of detached, bemused interest. And so hitherto hidden under the warm, familiar cloak of narrative, film seemed uncovered and exposed: a series of stills, (moving) snapshots cobbled together.

There’s a transparency of form; not only an acknowledgement of artifice but a revelry in it. The soundtrack has a lot to answer for in this regard. It is literally a soundtrack, no more than a track of sound attached temporally, not thematically, to the images of Rose. The upbeat Brazilian music chases after itself in the background, energetic and nonsensical. There’s no emotional range, nuances of tone, or swelling climaxes – it simply charges on absurdly behind the images. This sharp incongruence between aural and visual effects isolates the surfaces of the film, foregrounding the image. It permits the ascendance of the ocular.

The pure surfaces of Rose Hobart remind me of David Lynch’s 2006 INLAND EMPIRE, a tedious three-hour cinematic romp preoccupied with production, not plot; form, not substance. Particularly, Nikki’s refrain: “Sometimes I forget whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow”. Markers of time, the means by which we organise experience, collapse – hours and days are swallowed into a perpetual present, a slippery celluloid momentum without forward movement. INLAND EMPIRE, like Rose Hobart, refuses to streamline material according to a 1-2-3 chronological timeline or a linear narrative structure.

There’s a bigger question at the margins of Cornell’s film. Are narrative and film inseparable, destined lovers pledged til death do us part? Roland Barthes is confident of the essentiality of narrative constructions, in general:

"narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting…stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation…narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; narrative in international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself."

But there are those (Lev Manovich, Thomas Elsaesser) who suggest that the moving image lent itself to the culture of telling stories for only a short while, and that narrative-driven form is an exception and not a rule. For them, the end of the narrative film is heralded by the malleability and plasticity of the image achieved by digital technology. They think we’re heading to aesthetic terrain in which films are habitually extended ‘beyond narrative’. Personally, I’m not sure I buy it: for one thing, the popularity of the Hollywood film continues unabated. Not to mention that they may be overstating the revolutionary capabilities of digital technology, since non-narrative film isn’t exactly a new thing…Cornell’s Rose Hobart, anyone?

Having said that, I can’t help but recall Joan Didion writing at the point of epistemological break, a type of intellectual mid-life crisis:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself...I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience...experience as rather more electrical than ethical."