Figure as Force in Joseph Cornell's 'Rose Hobart'

The objects enclosed within Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages – the glass jars, marbles, pieces of driftwood and other ‘trinkets’ – are metaphoric souvenirs from the depths of his unconscious. They are transcendent forms, not simply inanimate objects. The same can be said of the silent protagonist in Cornell’s filmic collage Rose Hobart. This woman is no longer the actress Rose Hobart or even Linda Randolf, the character Hobart plays in George Melford’s East of Borneo (the original source of the footage used in Rose Hobart). She is something else entirely, an ungrounded and transient figure.

Cornell’s Rose does not belong to the jungle but to a sort of liminal space. Where the jungle is submerged in darkness she is luminous, a point of light against the murky depths of her surroundings. She floats through the jungle, existing outside of, and apart from, it. Her presence immaterial and intangible – almost ghost-like – and yet she possesses a profound energy and intensity. She is a figure who pulsates as she emits light, a phosphorescent entity.

Thought of in such terms she begins to mirror the image of the sun that Cornell continuously returns to throughout the film. This sun does not have a defined form because it is obscured by clouds. It is indistinct yet luminous and, just like Cornell’s Rose, almost throbs with a palpable vitality as it gives off light. 

This analogy between the woman and the sun, a figure/phantom and a celestial body, reminded me of one of Cornell’s most enigmatic series, his ‘Soap Bubble Sets’. In the first work within the series, called simply Soap Bubble Set, Cornell placed flat glass discs, a white clay pipe, a porcelain doll’s head and an egg in a wineglass in front of an image of the moon. All of these objects are fragile. While the egg hovers precariously in the wine glass, the doll’s head balances on a plinth. A crack is already visible on its small face.

In the presence of these fragile objects the moon’s own fragility becomes apparent. It has become the ‘soap bubble’ of the work’s title, a floating orb that will eventually burst.

The sun in Rose Hobart is characterized in a similar way. It is transient. At the end of the film we witness a solar eclipse that is paired with a shot of a ball falling into water as if the sun were falling out of the sky. In this instant the analogy between Cornell’s Rose, the floating, transient and ghost-like figure, and the sun is complete. The fall of the sun foreshadows Rose’s own fall, the moment when her light is extinguished once the projector is turned off.

Cornell’s Rose is, for me, a dream figure, a flickering light that emerges amid the darkness of sleep. Catherine Corman, among others, talks of the “oneiric logic”[i] that shapes Cornell’s film but somewhat overlooks the significance of his transcendent protagonist, referring to her simply as a “blank slate.”[ii] Cornell’s Rose is not, as I see her, a blank slate but a planet – a soap bubble planet – whose gravitational pull is the force that holds the film together. That is, until the bubble pops and she is once again enveloped in darkness.

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[i] Corman, Catherine. 2010. Surrealist Astronomy in the South Pacific: Joseph Cornell and the Collaged Eclipse. East of Borneo. Viewed 16^th March 2011 http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/13

[ii] Ibid