Basement Boy
Anthology Film Archive's 'Halogen Canticles' program presents a rare chance to see three staggeringly unstable movies - chlorotic, tumescent, features made in all good faith by clammy journeymen gone mad in high fevers - and, programmed alongside each, the landmark short films derived from them by back-alley emulsion doctors with secret, sadistic needs of their own.
Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936) is an enigmatic, mischievous rearrangement of shots culled from George Melford's lush compost heap of tropical jungle-adventure tropes, East of Borneo (1931). Perfervidly obsessed with the peculiar deciduous fineness of the movie's lead, actress manque Hobart, Cornell slices out all obstructive plot from Borneo and transforms it by the camera obscura of his famously boxed-up brain into a glorious parade of decontextualized portraits of his lissome fixation. By this method, virginal Cornell desired 'to release unreleased floods of music from the gaze of the human countenance in its prison of silver light.' The boner quotient is indeed high in this primitive and loving ejaculation from America's most important basement boy.
Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936) is an enigmatic, mischievous rearrangement of shots culled from George Melford's lush compost heap of tropical jungle-adventure tropes, East of Borneo (1931). Perfervidly obsessed with the peculiar deciduous fineness of the movie's lead, actress manque Hobart, Cornell slices out all obstructive plot from Borneo and transforms it by the camera obscura of his famously boxed-up brain into a glorious parade of decontextualized portraits of his lissome fixation. By this method, virginal Cornell desired 'to release unreleased floods of music from the gaze of the human countenance in its prison of silver light.' The boner quotient is indeed high in this primitive and loving ejaculation from America's most important basement boy.