Joseph Cornell versus Cinema by Michael Pigott (review)

Compared to other aspects of Joseph Cornell’s art practice, remarkably little has been written about his films. Michael Pigott, in his rich and provocative engagement with these screen works, suggests that this critical silence “arises at least partly from the difficulty in accounting for [them] within contemporary frameworks.”¹ These are films, he argues, that operate as “solutions to problems that have only now become apparent as such”—films whose significance and resonance we can now, from the vantage point of intervening decades, begin to unpack.² Drawing inspiration from (among others) Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of anarchaeology and Michel Foucault’s archaeological investigations of sociocultural stutters and abrasions, Pigott proposes positioning Cornell as a central figure in “an alternate history of the twentieth century.”³ In this Cornellian century, the filmmaker takes his rightful place as a key antecedent of, or influential figure within, numerous movements or strains of practice: “revelationist” film, remix culture, slow cinema.

The content of Joseph Cornell versus Cinema is broken into three main chapters. The first of these, “Found Footage,” delivers a multifaceted discussion of Cornell’s best-known film, Rose Hobart (1936). Almost all of Cornell’s nineteen-minute film was drawn from the B movie East of Borneo (George Melford, 1931), focusing particular attention on shots featuring the film’s star, Rose Hobart. In addition to selecting and editing footage, Cornell manipulated his materials by adding a colored tint, removing the audio track and adding a score of “exotica,” and slowing down the projection speed. As Pigott identifies, Rose Hobart is “a seminal precursor to the history of films that appropriate the content of other films, and is frequently acknowledged as such in critical accounts of found footage film.”⁴ These accounts, however, “usually move quickly on . . . to what they really want to talk about.”⁵ It is to Pigott’s credit that, in contrast, he analyzes particular sequences of Cornell’s film at length and offers a variety of framings of it. This includes valuable challenges to standard takes on Rose Hobart. For instance, contrary to accounts that describe the film as evacuated of plot or as anti-narrative, Pigott identifies narrative as central to its force: “it is the glimmers of narrative life and fragmentary patches of story-time that imbue Rose Hobart with its sense of limitless potential.”⁶

One filmmaker inspired by Rose Hobart was Ken Jacobs, who has acknowledged its impact on his Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969–1971)—and, indeed, on much of his subsequent career. Tom Tom occupies a similarly significant position in the history of found-footage cinema. Jacobs’s film takes an eight-minute Biograph one-reeler from 1905 and refilms it: speed is manipulated, sections looped, and focus directed in on particular elements of the film frame. Pigott notes the influence of Cornell on Jacobs and uses this to stage an encounter between these two films, and between the two filmmakers:

Both artists adopt a strategy of . . . induced illegibility, which is at once a means of revealing the illegible underside of an image, and a documented attempt to read the illegible. Both Jacobs and Cornell structure their films around the dual purpose (and double tension) of making the image illegible (again) and then attempting to read it. . . . They place us in a position to be able to read anew, and then present us with something that cannot be read.⁷

This dialectic and tension between the readable and the unreadable, the legible and the illegible, leads Pigott to Malcolm Turvey’s “revelationist tradition” in film theory. Turvey, in his book Doubting Vision, discusses the work of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer.⁸ He posits that, in contrast to theorists of the moving image who argued for the documentary power of cinema, these writers and filmmakers all proposed that film could reveal aspects of reality not visible to human vision. For Pigott, Cornell needs to be recognized as...