A short made by Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s– An ode to imagination, travel and literature. In true Cornellian fashion, the film borrows footage from, among other films, a Burton Holmes travelogue; Sightseeing tours of Dutch Marken and agrarian Asia therefore become the dream of a boy at a bookstall.

Joseph Cornell - 1938 - Bookstalls.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	9 min 18 s
Size: 	211 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 176 kb/s
BPP: 	0.383
Audio

https://nitro.download/view/1211ED5A446E5E4/Joseph_Cornell_-_1938_-_Bookstalls.mkv

Language(s):English
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The post Joseph Cornell – Bookstalls (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Cornell combines vaudeville and animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. It’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art” —Larry Jordan

Joseph Cornell - 1938 - Children's Party.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	10 min 46 s
Size: 	162 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	688x480 ~> 688x516
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	17.980 fps
Bit rate: 	2 096 kb/s
BPP: 	0.353
Audio

https://nitro.download/view/EC94676DDDD67DD/Joseph_Cornell_-_1938_-_Children’s_Party.mkv

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The post Joseph Cornell – Children’s Party (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The first and greatest American Surrealist, Joseph Cornell is best known for his boxes. The best of his mysterious assemblages of dime-store tchochkes and paper ephemera in little hand-made cabinets perfectly realize the elusive sublime at the heart of Surrealism, while avoiding the juvenile theatrics of his European colleagues.

However, Cornell was also one of the most original and accomplished filmmakers to emerge from the Surrealist movement, and one of the most peculiar. Just as the ascetic and introverted Cornell himself held Surrealism at arms length, borrowing only those elements that suited his interests and temperament, his films superficially resemble those made by other Surrealists, they are in truth sui generis. Only a handful of his contemporaries understood the genius of films like his Rose Hobart — an unfortunate situation exacerbated by Cornell’s own obstinate resistance to public screenings. No one made films even remotely similar to Cornell’s for almost thirty years, and even now the perfect opacity of his montage remains unrivalled.

Rose Hobart consists almost entirely of footage taken from East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn’t feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.

While East of Borneo is a sound film, Rose Hobart must be projected at silent speed, accompanied by a tape of “Forte Allegre” and “Belem Bayonne” from Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil, a kitschy record Cornell found in a Manhattan junk store. As a result, the characters move with a peculiar, lugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream. In addition, the film should be projected through a deep blue filter, unless the print is already tinted blue. The rich blue tint it imparts is the same hue universally used in the silent era to signify night.

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell’s hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.

But the root of Cornell’s genius as a filmmaker is his singular version of montage. Cornell’s version of continuity is the continuity of the dream. He does not juxtapose images so much as suggest unlikely — but still vaguely plausible — connections between them. Hobart’s clothing may change suddenly between shots, but her gesture is continued or she remains at a similar point in the frame. Unlike most collage filmmakers, Cornell does not rely on cheap irony or non sequitur. His films are unsettling because their inexplicable strings of images are like reflections from the deep well of the subconscious. In fact, one of the most arresting images in Rose Hobart comes when a solar or lunar eclipse is paired with the image of an object falling into a circular pool of water. Hobart simply gazes bemusedly at this spectacle, as if it were little more than a parlour trick.

Rose Hobart premiered in December, 1936 at the Julian Levy Gallery. Cornell included it in a matinee program of short films from his collection, which Levy titled “Goofy Newsreels.” The first Surrealist exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art was about to open, and many of the artists were in town, including Salvador Dali, who attended Cornell’s film program. During the screening of Rose Hobart, Dali became extremely agitated. Halfway through the film he began shouting “Salaud!” — bastard — and overturned the projector. Reportedly, Dali ruefully explained his actions to Levy, “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it (Solomon 89).” Some prefer an apocryphal — but far more poetic — explanation also attributed to Dali: “He stole it from my subconscious.” — Brian Frye

Joseph Cornell - 1936 - Rose Hobart.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	18 min 42 s
Size: 	295 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	15.984 fps
Bit rate: 	2 014 kb/s
BPP: 	0.365
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/1D44D859AA24135/Joseph_Cornell_-_1936_-_Rose_Hobart.mkv

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The post Joseph Cornell – Rose Hobart (1936) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary. – P. Adams Sitney

Quote:
“Like a man who’s just escaped from an asylum, Cornell’s camera whips away to follow pigeons, fixates on statues, dodges people’s gazes.”

Joseph Cornell - 1955 - The Aviary.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	13 min 57 s
Size: 	265 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 647 kb/s
BPP: 	0.319

https://nitro.download/view/28DA9758C5D14AF/Joseph_Cornell_-_1955_-_The_Aviary.mkv

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The post Joseph Cornell – The Aviary (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Jack’s Dream sees a frightful outside force enter and threaten the domestic space. Jack, the faithful dog, attempts to protect it and its inhabitants by chasing away the intruder. But his progress is blocked or retarded at several points (he views the scene through a window, a treacherous chair falls over) – evoking the familiar dream sensation of impossibly heavy feet, and suddenly multiplying obstructions. – Michael Pigott

Joseph Cornell - 1938 - Jack's Dream.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	3 min 47 s
Size: 	90.5 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 885 kb/s
BPP: 	0.348
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A77B28AE564F2CD/Joseph_Cornell_-_1938_-_Jack’s_Dream.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Joseph Cornell – Jack’s Dream (1938) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The image of the fountain returns in Angel (1957; color; 3 min.), one of Cornell’s most poignant films. Dedicated, as Cornell said, to his friend, the painter Pavel Tchelichew, who had recently died, the film offers a rather moving meditation on mortality. Comprised of static shots of a statue of an angel and a fountain in a Flushing cemetery, the films elegant and quiet close-ups against an expanse of blue sky of the statues solid yet partly decaying marble brilliantly capture a sense both of the earthly and time-bound and the unworldly and eternal. The films stylistically innovative dissociation of moving image from moving subject (a technique Cornell also largely deploys in “Centuries of June” from the same year) anticipates by several years the daring cinematic experiments of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), foregrounding duration, in contrast to movement, as cinemas true subject.

Joseph Cornell - 1957 - Angel.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	3 min 41 s
Size: 	74.0 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 803 kb/s
BPP: 	0.338

https://nitro.download/view/35D803F86FAE0B3/Joseph_Cornell_-_1957_-_Angel.mkv

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The post Joseph Cornell – Angel (1957) first appeared on Cinema of the World.