Marienbad, the monkey and me

  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.

 An exerpt from last year at the Marienbad and a blur filmclip homage:

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

Some critics take it for granted that Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) lacks social comment. No doubt Ruttmann’s main concern is an aesthetic or ‘musical’ veneration of movement and momentum, and visual motifs are primarily used to reinforce this. 

Shots of reels and levers are sometimes taken so close-up they are abstracted as moving shapes and angles. The quickening cuts of the train/tracks build toward a crescendo while also forcing the mind to fill in the sensory gap and ‘hear’ the train. The upward tilt of the church-like windows in the train dock reflects the change to a relaxed time signature and general reverence for industrial modernity. Steam filtered through the darkness reminds me of film noir tropes, but here it's simply a neutral form. 

But it’s hard to believe that a montage - ‘the perfect device to produce a vision of the world more complete than the human eye could ever afford’, according to Graf (2009) – is socially or ideologically ambivalent. Ruttmann’s vision is of a near-utopian modernity, where bodies are treated interchangeably with rotating gears in rhythmic harmony. Empty sewers resemble arteries of a big organism of which active humans become the lifeblood. This unity/circulation, aside from a study of movement, reflects transhumanist, futurist, or even communist sentiments.

More substantially, Ruttmann balances an appreciation of beauty and momentum through rhythm with a slight weariness of passivity and vulnerability amidst the modern industrial maze. There are omens - e.g., the repeated and sped-up dogfight – that produce tension according to the ups and downs of the symphony. The left/right arrows denote complexity or confusion. The recurring spirals echo the actions of machines, workers and rippling water, but also suggest hypnosis and seduction. Animals and humans thus sleep and rest, but are jolted into action (or escape) with the tempo.

One spiral precedes a woman’s suicide. Graf (2009) notes its connection with mannequins and jewels forewarns the  ‘commodification and exploitation of women’. I’d add that the printed repetition of ‘Geld’, meaning ‘Money’, contributes to show an underlying discord  that arises with when one is lost in the 'spiral' of modernity, or unquestioningly accepts the industrial ethos. 

The spectator’s contrived acting here also contrasts the ‘real’ Berliners, but they too are a part of modernity (i.e., cinema). They seem to be watching the reflective water after the suicide, as we do in the opening of the film. This collective narcissistic/voyeuristic social reflection is analogous to movie going, where cultures experience themselves through art. 

The clash of the suicide and the social spectacle relates to the paradoxically fragmentary/connective aspects of modernity typified by the cinema experience. For instance, I was more transfixed by Manhatta (1921) in class (I haven't seen many other silent films) than Berlin alone, which I pin down to a sense of disjointed intimacy unique to the cinema/theater, which draws attention to the shared screen space (O'Hara's An Image of Leda captures this experience well).

Another factor in attention is music (I watched some scenes with the ‘original’ score), which works with the visual symphony to unite the film as an emotional or sublime experience, whereas in silence my thoughts tend to be more verbal and tangential, and each scenic or rhythmic shift slightly disintegrated, bringing social ideology forward at the slight expense of aesthetics.