Rose Hobart

Joseph Cornell's reworking of East of Borneo from a feature length jungle picture into a 19-minute ode to the film's star was created out of an obsession formed around the actress Rose Hobart. Cornell, having bought a copy of the movie for his own viewing pleasure, became captivated by Hobart’s beauty, and subsequently cut the film up so that what remained was a series of vignettes focusing almost exclusively on the actress. In exhibiting the film to a public audience, Cornell’s film openly expressed his own private desire and fixation on a cinematic idol.

The significance of his work is that it exposes the way in which we all fixate on celebrities; Rose Hobart can be seen as the ultimate movie in this way, as it removes all the detritus surrounding the idealized fetish object – the star. In creating a focus exclusively around Rose Hobart, Cornell gives voice to the fantasy of what the celebrity represents to an audience, and to the way in which an audience interacts and projects their own desires onto film stars.

Cornell first exhibited his work in 1936, from a film that was made in 1931. Although (comparatively to our perspective) the film industry was still young at this point, significant technical and artistic mastery of the form had already been achieved. By 1936, films were well into the sound era, and the use of colour in film was already slowly seeping into the mainstream, with The Wizard Of Oz (as a famous example of (Techni)colour film) only three years away. By this point, both the film industry and its audience had a solid grasp on how films were to be made and then viewed. The focus of Hollywood, if not all traditional narrative driven films, was on the actors and actresses featured on the silver screen. Since the early days of nickelodeons, it had become noticeably apparent that people would respond to certain faces on screen, faces that they would willingly pay to see again and again. With early feature films in the silent era, the demand for certain actors had already become firmly entrenched in audience’s minds. And so, we find the beginning of a filmic tradition that has remained unchanged since: the star system.

Rose Hobart is a prime example of how we, the audience, respond to these stars. We see them as some sort of ideal, an image of perfection. The star offers us a fantasy in which we can see ourselves in their place. They provide a point that we can fixate on, and fetishize. Cornell cut up East of Borneo so that this point of fetish is all that remains; story, dialogue, action, etc. are made irrelevant in the face of the all-powerful Rose Hobart, who remains on screen as a constant focus throughout. Rose Hobart gives us exactly the opposite of what a traditional film gives us. Instead of anticipation and build up, the film is all pay off, it is all climax.

Cornell goes to further extremes to give the audience the ultimate in voyeuristic pleasure. We don’t want stars to live normal lives, and we don’t want them to exist in the real world. For stars to be stars, to give us the pleasure of fantasy and role-play, they must exist in a perfect, fantastic world – the world of film. Rose Hobart is tinted blue, is slowed down to a graceful, leisurely and elegant pace and is without dialogue. The star is unencumbered by any intrusion of reality whatsoever, and exists only as an object of our (or in this case Cornell’s) desire.