Alberte Pagán

[printed in Found Footage Magazine

Special Issue #10, October 2024, pp. 70-81]

Joseph Cornell is best known for his collages and box-constructions, in which he assembles found objects in a way not dissimilar to the cinematic concept of montage. The artist applied the same collagist technique to his films. If there is a canonical work in the history of experimental cinema, it is Rose Hobart, his first and most well-known film, made in the 1930s, which marked the beginning of the fruitful and long-standing practice of found footage cinema. Today, Rose Hobart is a widely recognized classic—it is part of the Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema Repertory, and has been included in the United States Library of Congress. However, Rose Hobart had minimal exhibition since its premiere in December 1936 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, so it could have easily disappeared from film history without much consequence had it not been recovered and reevaluated by a group of people who collaborated with Cornell in one way or another. Its consolidation as a seminal work and acknowledged masterpiece is due to the endorsement of filmmakers such as Larry Jordan—“His influence on me touches the very foundation of my life” (Jordan, n.d.:n.p.); Stan Brakhage —“Cornell is a monumental figure” (Solomon, 1997:227); Ken Jacobs, who confessed to having felt “knocked out” by the film (Sitney, 2002:331); and Jonas Mekas, responsible for the re-release of Rose Hobart at the New York Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in 1963 (Pigott, 2013:24).

…MAIS