We said last seminar that Rose Hobart would probably stick with us throughout the course. So far it has. Here's why Cornell’s film has been quietly lingering around all of the films I’ve seen since, to the point where the most interesting thing about watching Piccadilly was its comforting blue hue...
Cornell apparently had an artistic fetish for boxes. But boxes are boring - an axiom ingrained in a number of derogatory metaphors (you're a square, think outside the box, etc etc). What interests me more here are circles, especially the mandala (Sanskrit for -- *drum roll* -- 'circle').
According to Jung, the mandala symbolises the unified wholeness of the self. It is one of the recurring cultural motifs he points to as evidence of a collective unconscious of archetypal memories/emotions shared across humanity. Reconciling this with the individual conscious leads to individuation, or self-harmony.
The ripple caused by the object dropped into the water in Rose is Cornell's mandala.
I was first reminded of Jung by Hobart's monkey friend. When I think 'monkey' I think of primal humanity, especially in the jungle. We all share ancestry with primates, and according to Jung we all share a primitive unconscious with humanity. The monkey is Cornell’s anima, Hobart’s animus.
Hobart's silent discussion with the monkey further reflects Freud's vision of a constant dialogue between the id, the ego and the superego. Cornell (and according to Freud, everyone) is thereby obsessed with 'sex and aggression'. The sex part is obvious. The aggression is shown when tribespeople - the primal subconscious - attack the clothed, 'civilised' foreigner, or the ego. Cornell documents the universal attempt to become 'whole' in both the Freudian and Jungian sense by seeking to reconcile the collective unconscious, subconscious and conscious mind.
This struggle is analogous to filmmaking. A film is a conscious construct, but still permeated by subconscious messages and raw natural impulses - manifest in Cornell’s candle, volcano and eclipse, for example - that mammoth, submerged chunk of the personality iceberg often found in our dreams. Rose is both a projection of Cornell’s subconscious, and a conscious reflection upon it through psychoanalytic/analytical psychology tropes.
One could even say that Cornell strips the superficial 'ego' of conventional or b-grade cinema, which operates according to the reality principle (like the profit motive), to reveal the pleasure principle, epitomised by Hobart, the object of Cornell's desire and most basic urges. Frye’s article mentioned that no one "made films even remotely similar to Cornell's for almost thirty years". Since Inception seems to come up a lot it's worth looking at a film Nolan was supposed to have ripped off: L'Année dernière à Marienbad, a French new wave film released 30+ years after Rose.
Like Rose, a woman, seemingly inside a dream is involved. Her stalker this time is visible, and spends the movie trying to convince the woman they know each other, and to break free of an anonymous man who constantly gets in the way (like the man in white in Rose). She is, like Hobart, seductive, resistant and nonchelant all at once. Space and time are distorted and repetitions abound to replicate dream logic, which is at once universal and unique. Rose was an abstraction of an uninspired but nonetheless inspiring movie (East of Borneo) that would influence the French hybrid of more conventional narration and dream, and finally back to the more literal narratology of Inception. Cinema uses these techniques like no other medium, and it is thus married to the universally shared experience of the dream.
Rose Hobart haunts moviegoers simply because we all dream and watch movies, two things bound in a unique relationship that is symbolised by Cornell’s uncanny fan film.
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An exerpt from last year at the Marienbad and a blur filmclip homage:
