Pigott, Michael. "Editorial Preface." Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. vi#viii. Bloomsbury Collections . Web. 31 Jul. 2020. <>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com , 31 July 2020, 00:17 UTC. Copyright © Michael Pigott 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. Editorial Preface New York artist Joseph Cornell once made the equation ‘collage = reality’, and in manifestly literal ways his work bears this maxim out, whether one is talking about one of the boxes for which he is best known or the more obscure fi lms, the subject of Michael Pigott’s book here. The ‘collage = reality’ equation is not simply a neat way of encapsulating what Cornell achieved in his work when (an instinctive hoarder) he collected found objects, rediscovered fragments of somebody else’s overlooked life, and put them in eclectic unity with each other. ‘Collage = reality’ also offers a route into understanding important but often neglected interdisciplinary con- cerns of much 20th-century art and fi lm. Cornell’s fi rst fi lm, Rose Hobart (1936), was made up exclusively of sections of the B movie East of Borneo, converting a low rent but full-length feature into an elliptical 19-minute fi lm ‘authored’ by Joseph Cornell. My inverted commas are an inevitable reminder of the tensions between re-appropriated objects and artists, as recycling is not an automatic guarantor of creative ownership, as Emile de Antonio found out to his cost when, in 1963, the New York Film Festival rejected his fi rst documentary Point of Order for not being ‘a real fi lm’. Point of Order (1964) was de Antonio’s fi rst exercise in radical scavenging, 1 a fi lm in which 188 hours of live CBS transmission of the Army vs. Joseph McCarthy hearings of 1954 were translated into a 97-minute fi lm with a very different and contradistinctive, retrospective narrative charting the anti-communist senator’s demise. De Antonio, arguably the most effective documentary chronicler of 1960s—70s US history, coined the term ‘collage junk’ to describe his compilation method of working with non fi ctional footage, an idea purloined, he said, from his ‘painter friends’ (such as Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, who were among those he interviewed for his 1972 fi lm, Painters Painting ). So much 20th-century art before and after Cornell existed at that murky, shrouded intersection between alternative realities. One such example is the mid-century work of Marcel Duchamp, whom Cornell greatly admired and in whose honour he created, as Pigott reminds us, his Duchamp Dossier (1942–53), a found footage bank of papers, fragments and scraps. 1 See Bernard Weiner’s ‘Radical Scavenging: An Interview with Emile de Antonio’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, (Autumn 1971): 3. EDITORIAL PREFACE VII Marcel Duchamp took everyday objects and asked his audiences to fi nd in them artistic value, just as fellow collagist Kurt Schwitters created densely layered works out of newspaper cuttings, sweet wrappers, fl ashcards and fragments of broken possessions. Collaging, the recon fi guration of objects and clips from other people’s lives, dominated the quest to problematize simplistic understandings of the real. Cornell, though reclusive, did not inhabit a rari fi ed universe. Just as he raided thrift shops and charity stores in search of abandoned particles from the lives of others, many a not-too- well-to-do 20th-century family would have perused similar bric-a-brac shops or junk stores for cheap used things to make a dwelling a home in the dark ages before IKEA. Most of us might no longer live the idea that reality is best understood as a collage, but art and fi lm have not abandoned the concept, notwithstanding the multiple challenges to representation as well as to humanity mounted by 9/11. Following in the footsteps of de Antonio, Bruce Conner or Peter Greenaway (in his early non fi ction phase), there are numerous 21st-century examples (even in the mainstream) of the notion that collage and reality are equivalents: animated documentaries such as: Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008); the graphic narrative opening to Ben Af fl eck’s Argo (2012); the analytical, archive-based documentary series of Adam Curtis; or the installation pieces of Phil Collins. Old boundaries between reality and fi ction, performance and reality, collage and observation, history and current affairs are still being smudged over – if not entirely disregarded. Just as Cornell’s boxes or fi lms are both idiosyncratic masterpieces and collections of random tidbits, so Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema is not, as Pigott’s fi rst lines tell us, a book about Cornell’s fi lms but rather a book about their signi fi cance to ‘the project of understanding how we relate to moving images’. Cornell was very much of his time and place, but he was also ahead of his time and place: now, everywhere you look, reality is a collage. Like Cornell’s boxes and fi lms, this book charts a non-linear path through the artist’s lesser-known fi lm work, singling out three key themes that run through them: ‘found footage’, ‘texture and affect’ and ‘time and the everyday’. But this wide-ranging study extends far beyond Cornell’s fi lms and their immediate impact, arguing, for instance, for the compatibilities and not merely the divergences between his analogue fi lms and contemporary digital technologies. If you type ‘Joseph Cornell’ into the most overcrowded found footage bank of them all, YouTube, you get a sense of the reclusive VIII EDITORIAL PREFACE 20th-century artist’s enduring appeal and in fl uence as well as indications of how digitization and advances in technology have dictated who is interested in, as well as how we can now access, Cornell’s work: on the opening menu page an uploaded Rose Hobart sits alongside extracts from his other fi lms, fi lms about Cornell or instructions for how to make a Joseph Cornell box. In a month or two, the menu will comprise different entries: ‘reality = collage’ ... recurring. Stella Bruzzi University of Warwick Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without a period of research leave granted in autumn 2012. For this I thank the Department of Film and Television Studies, the Department of History of Art, and the School of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Several colleagues at Warwick have also contributed directly through discussion of the work while it was in progress, including: Charlotte Brunsdon, Jon Burrows, Michael Hatt, and Karen Lang. Catherine Constable has given sound advice throughout. Two fi gures deserve mention for their foundational guidance and persistent in fl uence: Richard Dyer and V. F. Perkins. Aspects of this work have been presented at the NECS 2012 conference in Lisbon, at the Warwick History of Art Research Seminar, and at the Fast/ Slow: Intensi fi cations of Cinematic Speed symposium at Anglia Ruskin University. Each of these occasions proved extremely stimulating and useful, and I would particularly like to thank Catherine Fowler and Janet Harbord for their comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Stella Bruzzi and Santiago Oyarzabal, whose careful reading of the manuscript helped to smooth out the rough edges, strengthen the argument, and add richness. At Bloomsbury I would like to thank Caroline Wintersgill for her care and un fl agging support of the project, and her assistant Mark Richardson. For image permissions, I thank the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Eureka! Entertainment (and Craig Keller for his rapid responses). For their generosity and helpfulness, I thank Ken Jacobs and William Rose. As ever, I am grateful to Denise for her companionship and love. And fi nally, I would like to thank my parents, Mike and Mairéad, and my sister Jane, for their constant belief in and support of my dubious career choices, strange work schedules, and intellectual endeavours. Where to Find Cornell’s Films Many of Cornell’s fi lms are now available on DVD, though they are scattered across a number of collections. Sources for the key fi lms discussed during the course of this book are listed below. A Legend for Fountains , (1957–65), 16mm, 19 mins. Available on The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell DVD from The Voyager Foundation, 2003. Angel , (1957), 16mm, 4 mins. Available on The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell DVD from The Voyager Foundation, 2003. By Night With Torch And Spear , ( c 1942, restored 1979), 16mm, 8 mins. Available on Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986 DVD set from National Film Preservation Foundation/Image Entertainment, 2008. Gnir Rednow , (1955–60), 16mm, 6 mins. Available on Les Movements des Images DVD from Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006. Jack’s Dream , ( c 1938, completed by Larry Jordan in 1970), 16mm, 4 mins. Available on Unseen Cinema DVD set from Anthology Film Archives/Image Entertainment. Also available on The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell DVD from The Voyager Foundation, 2003. Rose Hobart , (1936, restored 1969), 16mm, 19 mins. Available on Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films DVD box set from National Film Preservation Foundation/Image Entertainment. Also available on Les Movements des Images DVD from Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006, and on The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell DVD from The Voyager Foundation, 2003. The Aviary , (1955), 16mm, 11 mins. Available on The Magical Films of Joseph Cornell DVD from The Voyager Foundation, 2003. These and several more of Cornell’s fi lms may also be found online by searching YouTube or visiting UbuWeb (ubu.com/ fi lm/cornell.html) Introduction This is not a book about the fi lms of Joseph Cornell. This is a book about the signi fi cance of Cornell’s fi lms to the project of understanding how we relate to moving images – what they do for us now, at the beginning of the twenty- fi rst century, and what they have done for us at various points throughout the twentieth century. It is also a book about the transferable values of images, about compression technologies, and about time. Cornell is primarily known for his boxes. These intricately crafted collages of pop culture fragments and the detritus of an antique dream world would eventually earn him recognition as one of the major American artists of the twentieth century. The boxes are concise distillations of a fervid fantasy life, each one an imaginative seed for the viewer. This work has rightly been given serious critical attention, yet his body of fi lm work has gone relatively under-explored. I intend to examine his approach to fi lm-making on its own terms, as a series of innovative, idiosyncratic and seminal engagements with the medium of fi lm. Cornell amassed huge ‘dossiers’ full of the images and things he found in junk shops and thrift stores around his home in Queens, New York. On his travels he also collected celluloid fi lm prints, many of which he found discarded in the warehouses of New Jersey. He cut up and reassembled this material, carefully extracting the moving images that resonated most for him (for a variety of reasons), re-ordering them, mixing them with sections from other fi lms, and often adding his own soundtracks during projection. He had a string of assistants who went on to become some of the central fi gures of experimental fi lm – Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan and Ken Jacobs – and through them he altered the course of experimental moving image art. In the words of J. Hoberman, ‘. . . it is apparent that Cornell, as much as Maya Deren, was the progenitor of American avant-garde fi lm’. 1 Cornell’s fi lm work has never been so relevant, and it reveals much about some very recent developments in practices of viewing and creating audiovisual media. The concepts of the video mashup, the remix, and user- generated content permeate contemporary discussions of our audiovisual culture. Yet in some respects these engagements are nothing new. Joseph 2 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA Cornell made the fi rst fanvid, and was a pioneer of the remix. 2 Just as he trawled warehouses and junk shops for material, so contemporary remix artists trawl the digital silos of the Internet for raw material. Cornell’s fi lm work therefore offers a fascinating and insightful perspective on the twenty- fi rst century media user’s experience; the ways in which the contemporary user approaches, thinks about and engages with the entangled mass of audiovisual texts before them, developing sometimes very personal, idiosyncratic tastes and often lovingly (or not so lovingly) turning and tuning these texts to their own ends. Content, user-generated or otherwise, saturates many twenty- fi rst century lives. The great quantity of audiovisual texts that we encounter (or are available to us) on a daily basis is matched by the speed at which they can be accessed by us, or, indeed, that they can access us. In response to this overwhelming burden of information and speed, many groups and individuals have made a conscious choice to live slowly, to consume and create audiovisual texts that move slowly and promote slowness, absorption and concentration rather than speed, dispersal (or ‘multi-tasking’) and accumulation. Cornell’s later fi lm work also presages this shift in attitudes. His ‘slow cinema’ offers another alternative form of moving image making, one that grows from and builds upon his earlier found footage work. While these might seem like novel connections to make, beyond this novelty there are much more signi fi cant, fruitful and fundamental links to be made, both in terms of learning about and understanding Cornell’s work, and in terms of learning about and understanding today’s audiovisual media. P. Adam Sitney, one of the few critics to have written in depth about the fi lm work, appraises the situation well: Joseph Cornell’s cinema remains the central enigma of his work. His fi lms have a roughness and an insidiousness that the constructions and collages never exhibit. A convenient attitude to take toward them would be to undervalue them, as many have done, including the artist himself. 3 This book, therefore, attempts to re-evaluate Cornell’s fi lm work, but it does so not by analyzing the fi lms in relation to his already vaunted box works, nor by slavishly defending the fi lms according to existent regimes of INTRODUCTION 3 cinematic value, but by connecting them to a series of persistent issues that have been articulated in a variety of ways during the last century, and now raise their heads again as a set of new and unique problems and solutions. I argue that Cornell’s fi lms offer a linking factor that connects what seem like uniquely contemporary issues back to a longer history of discourse and negotiation, and furthermore, that Cornell’s fi lms bene fi t from reading them in this light – they were solutions to problems that have only now become apparent as such, and their value emerges from the way in which they set up radically alternative terms of engagement and valuation within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of 1936, 1955, and 2013. The study will reveal the signi fi cance of his work for the fi eld of fi lm history, but also for the study of twentieth century art, aesthetic philosophy, contemporary audiovisual culture, and the relationship between images, technology and culture. Silence It is undoubtedly the case that the silence around Cornell’s fi lm work comes partly from his disinclination to show his work or promote it during his lifetime, as well as the indeterminate provenance of much of the work that was discovered after his death. But it is also very probable that the critical silence stems from the very nature of the works themselves. As we will see, they do not lend themselves readily to the critical structures (or frameworks, or systems, or simply approaches – whatever we choose to call them) that emerged during the course of the twentieth century in order to cope with the phenomena of the moving image arts – those that dealt primarily with narrative cinema, nor even those that dealt with the avant-garde. In comparison with his box works, Cornell’s fi lms, at fi rst glance, seem to lack content, intent, authorial voice – they seem to offer so relatively little. However, I will argue that it is precisely because of this paucity of authorial control, the stripping back of concept and narrative, that Cornell’s fi lms establish, in a variety of ways, a new and revolutionary mode of fi lm-making. In fact, as we will see, he sets precedents for a number of new modes in the fi eld of experimental moving images. One of the things that I will suggest is that Cornell’s fi lms document and re-present paths toward discovery. In this way they engage directly with questions about the role of the spectator as active participant, and the nature of knowledge transfer, understanding, and aesthetic experience. 4 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA Understanding is different to interpretation according to the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (and also, I would argue, according to Hans Georg Gadamer and Henri Bergson). Interpretation is a complex form of rule-following, whereas understanding is a more heterogeneous and idiosyncratic event, one that is necessarily incomplete, always in a process of closing or attempting to close, but also, and always, in a synchronic process of opening up again, of being foiled and forced to return to the object of understanding. The same viewer/reader may experience very different understandings of the same object across a series of viewings/readings. This is precisely the problem and value of Cornell’s fi lms. They evade interpretation in a most concerted and stubborn way, yet open themselves freely and generously to understanding. Because of the way that the majority of critical frameworks function, therefore, his fi lm work has largely been met with silence. It may strike some that my choice of theoretical sources – Georges Didi- Huberman, Jean Luc Nancy, Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Henri Bergson, and Aloïs Riegl – is a touch eclectic, and perhaps arbitrary. In response I would assert that I have drawn upon the work of this motley crew of theorists because I believe that there is a rough accord in their approach to the relationship between the subject and the object, between the audience and the work, the person and the thing. At the very least, each in one way or another contributes to such an accord. Each does the work of drawing the outlines or colouring in the form of a fully- fl edged conceptual framework. The present work, if it is anything, is only a synthesis of these ideas as a provoked response to the searingly incisive and revelatory fi lm work of Joseph Cornell. It constitutes an attempt to formulate an aesthetic theory that emerges as a response to the exceptionality of Cornell’s art, the things it asks of the viewer, and the experience that it sets up. Whatever is illuminated in relation to this limit case may then be turned back upon the generality of fi lm experience, art experience, and the understanding of aesthetic life. The Cornellian Century By Night With Torch And Spear ( c 1942), which I discuss in detail in Chapter Two, was only discovered after Cornell’s death, amongst the fi lm collection that he donated to Anthology Film Archives in 1969. Consequently, its INTRODUCTION 5 provenance or status within Cornell’s oeuvre is somewhat uncertain. It is unclear as to whether Cornell considered it to be fi nished or worth releasing. While Cornell was a proli fi c box maker, and was quite successful during his lifetime in terms of selling and exhibiting his box works, he was somewhat reticent and even secretive about his fi lm-making. So while part of what I argue here is for the signi fi cance of Cornell’s fi lms for the history of fi lm and moving image art, most of his fi lms were seen by very few people during his lifetime, and a relatively limited number since his death. In a sense, the history of Cornell’s fi lms and their signi fi cance is a hidden history. Because of this fact, and also because of the myths, legends and stories that accrue around Cornell, which one can never be truly con fi dent in, I choose to call it an alternate history. The centrality of Cornell’s fi lm work, and the hidden signi fi cance and prescience of his formal and thematic experimentation, leads me to suggest the notion of a Cornellian century, an alternate history of the twentieth century that recuperates the fi lm work of Cornell. As we all know, the telling of a history is the telling of a story, and the villain in this story is Salvador Dalí. There is an apocryphal tale of a meeting between Dalí and Cornell. The speci fi cs of the tale change slightly from teller to teller, but the several witness accounts all agree fundamentally that something like the following happened. Cornell curated a programme of fi lms at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1936. As part of this programme he showed Rose Hobart (1936) for the fi rst time. Several of the major Surrealists from Europe were visiting New York at the time, and Cornell had been prominently included, along with the work of Ernst, Duchamp, De Chirico, Hausmans, Arp and Dalí, in the ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Alfred Barr. Dalí was in the audience at Cornell’s screening, along with his wife Gala. After Rose Hobart had fi nished he allegedly leapt to his feet in a fury and pushed the projector over, claiming that Cornell had stolen the idea directly from his subconscious, and he then stormed out. His wife Gala came up to Cornell afterwards to apologize, explaining that Dalí had been furious because he had a similar idea for a fi lm, but had not gotten around to actually doing it. It could also be the case that Dalí saw this fi lm and simply wished that Dalí had come up with the idea. Either way, Dalí had already done his damage. Cornell was famously shy and reticent, and he was so shocked and disturbed by Dalí’s outburst that, although he continued 6 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA to make them throughout his career, he seldom showed any of his own fi lms again within his lifetime. So this is partly why I describe the work that I am doing as writing an alternate history – it is the history of Joseph Cornell the fi lm-maker, whose fi lms quietly turned fi lm form inside-out, and who explored possibilities that the rest of the experimental fi lm-making world would not come across for another thirty years. The Cornellian century is an alternate history, an attempt to think about what might have happened, in order to identify how things might have been, but perhaps most importantly to better understand how the things that have happened have been theorized, criticized and talked about. Cornell was before his time, after his time, a man out of time. He was an anachronism, a geographical oddity (because he stayed in one place, never venturing outside of New York, yet he also constituted a sort of European Surrealist outpost in the USA). His oeuvre is connected by a theme and a function – the recreation of the past from a series of clues, the recreation of the magical everyday of a lost world through the fragments that remain. In this way it is a recreation of history, the fabrication of histories correspondent to, though not quite the same as, the of fi cial story. Cornell concentrates whole eras and worlds into his box creations, and across the range of his body of fi lm work he performs a similar feat. His fi lms condense time and space, carefully eliminating and expanding details, twisting perception out of everyday grooves. The oddity of the man, and the work that he undertook of reconstructing an uncertain past, drives the present study on toward the fabrication of a Cornellian century. This kind of approach has precedents. In his recent work on the history of media and technology, Siegfried Zielinski has proposed a form of historical re-imagining that he calls ‘anarchaeology’. 4 It focuses on histories of failed or unrealized inventions, on anomalous discoveries and theories, each the obsessive project of an ‘outsider’, each of which was at odds with the predominant discourse and conformity of their day. Before that, Michael Foucault suggested that there was more to be discovered in an archaeology of the ruptures and disturbances in systems and regimes of thought, art and sociality, than in the study of the linear progress of reason, discovery and evolution. 5 And before that still, Walter Benjamin laid out his early years in Berlin as a tale of forking paths, roads not taken, memories bearing richer fl esh and weirder contours than their origins ever had. 6 INTRODUCTION 7 This book is interested in placing Cornell’s work and thought in dialogue with a future culture that Cornell could not have foreseen, with a mediascape he would not have considered, and ways of being in the world that he could only have imagined. Yet I would like to argue that Cornell glimpsed the fringes of the future, that his anachronism and oddity afforded him a privileged position from which to explore new or undervalued modes of being and knowing. His fi lms, while never widely viewed, understood or valued, have nevertheless had a lasting impact. They too lingered on the fringes of the future, popping up here and there as an in fl uence on another artist’s work, or as an unexpectedly striking retrospective in a university or festival, an astonishing short feature on an archive DVD, a clandestine force to be reckoned with. P. Adams Sitney once again offers insight: Slowly, and always in a maze of ambiguities, these works keep reappearing to testify to a passion and a genius for cinema that stubbornly persists in undermining our expectations and challenging our certitudes, by hinting that the very experience of cinema might have a dimension we would rather overlook. 7 Joseph Cornell versus Marcel Duchamp Just as Cornell took on a series of assistants who helped to organise his materials and produce his fi lms, Marcel Duchamp took Cornell on as an assistant in the early 1940s, with the task of helping him put together several iterations of his Boîte-en-valise (1935–41). This was a deluxe edition of twenty boxes containing reproductions and miniature versions of many of his famous works (there was a tiny porcelain reproduction of Fountain (1917), for instance). During this period of collaboration Cornell began his Duchamp Dossier (1942–53), a large collection of papers, fragments and scraps, some of which were outtakes from the Boîte-en-valise series. Cornell obviously held Duchamp in high regard, a fact evidenced in his highlighting of Duchamp’s work as superior to the Surrealist work that they both found themselves lumped in with. Cornell had already begun to build three- dimensional collages into boxes by this stage (notably Soap Bubble Set , 1936), but the in fl uence of Duchamp on his work is palpable. Apart from the af fi nity between these two artists, there is an interesting comparison to be made between their careers, and the respective trajectories 8 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA of appreciation and in fl uence commanded by their work. After the initial success and infamy of the 1910s and 1920s, Duchamp and his work somewhat receded from the discourse of the mainstream art world, his iconoclastic deconstructions of the notion of the art object displaced by the renewed Modernist focus, and profound belief in the integral power of the art object, of the Abstract Expressionists. However, from the mid-1950s on his star began to rise again, as a number of young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage drew upon the astonishing precedent of his work as a source for reaction against what they saw as the patriarchal, masculine, intellectualist and essentialist doctrine of an art world dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Interest in Duchamp was revived, and artists such as Rauschenberg seemed to take up where he had left off. This was most clearly articulated in Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 article ‘Art After Philosophy’, in which he credits Duchamp with having invented conceptual art forty years before it was consolidated into a movement. 8 Another path not taken, now taken. Cornell’s fame grew gradually and continually over the course of his career, allowing him to quit his day job in 1940 to make art full time. His box collages garnered him much fame, invitations to exhibit, and avid collectors. His fi lm work, however, has certainly not been rediscovered in the same way that Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual work was. Its in fl uence has been felt through the work of the young fi lm-makers that he inspired, both directly and indirectly, but it needs the kind of explicitly articulated recuperation and assertion of signi fi cance that was accorded Duchamp’s work in the middle of the century. This book is an attempt to identify some paths not taken, and the ways in which those paths are bound up with the history and future of moving image art. CHAPTER ONE Found Footage Rose Hobart was a fi lm as it was remembered. – Ken Jacobs 1 Cornell’s fi lm Rose Hobart is often erroneously given the honour of being the fi rst found footage fi lm. This is not the case – there had been previous examples of fi lm-makers creating fi lm collages (notably Es fi r Shub 2 ), and even, much earlier, the widespread practice of fi lm exhibitors creating unique evening presentations by splicing together a number of short fi lms garnered from a variety of sources. 3 Rose Hobart is, however, the most prominent early collage fi lm, as well as being Cornell’s best known fi lm work. It is a seminal precursor to the history of fi lms that appropriate the content of other fi lms, and is frequently acknowledged as such in critical accounts of found footage fi lm. However, such accounts usually move quickly on from this acknowledgement to get to what they really want to talk about, which is likely appropriation in the mode of Bruce Conner’s work, and the fl ourishing of similar work from the 1960s onwards. Yet, there is something quite different about the mode of utilization or deployment of found footage between these two periods, between Cornell’s Rose Hobart and Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958). The peculiarity of Cornell’s use is occasionally acknowledged also, but almost always in a way that presents it as simply that – peculiar. A wonderful eccentricity, an emanation of obsessive love, at worst an accidentally signi fi cant conceptual precedent for found footage and the practice of editing against the grain (implicitly inscribing the later period as primary, because of its clearer intellectual foundations and conceptual framework). Rose Hobart is described as mysterious, lugubrious, atmospheric, oneiric. All of which manage to name the difference but tell us little about it. What I want to do in this chapter is to work towards identifying and analyzing the particular found footage mode of Cornell’s early work, and to do so I will look at another fi lm-maker who worked with found footage in a different period, and whose own peculiar mode of practice has been much more fully and fruitfully analyzed and 10 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA explicated in recent work by Michele Pierson 4 and Malcolm Turvey 5 – that fi lm-maker is Ken Jacobs. Rose Hobart had a profound effect on Jacobs and his then brother-in- arms Jack Smith, its in fl uence clearing the path for Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (Jacobs, 1969–71) and a proli fi c career full of forensic explorations of cinema, time and perception. In Jacobs’ words, ‘We thought he had directly broken through the drags on cinema, all the plotting that distracted from and justi fi ed these satisfactions of chaotic desire that really brought the customers in’. 6 The removal of structures in order to reveal or release something contained, or latent, within the footage is a key characteristic of Cornell’s fi lm work, and a shared goal and strategy developed across Jacobs’ vast and impressive body of work. In this respect, the lack of an antecedent or pre-existing conceptual framework, in comparison with the found footage work of the second half of the twentieth century, is less a problem than a de fi ning and positive attribute. During the course of this chapter I will endeavour to explain what it means to lack such a framework, and why such lack might be desirable. Tom Tom the Piper’s Son In 1969 Jacobs took an eight minute Biograph one reel movie entitled Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (probably fi lmed by Billy Bitzer in 1905, with a signi fi cant contribution from Wallace McCutcheon) and re- fi lmed it using a 16mm camera and an RCA home sound projector. 7 The result sparked off a wave of interest in early fi lm, as well as a serious critical reconsideration of the aesthetics and value of work that had for a long time been written off as naive. That fi lm, also called Tom Tom the Piper’s Son , uses its seventy minute running time to examine, interrogate, and play with these moving images of (most probably dead) people. Using a projector and a translucent screen he re- fi lms the original, manipulating both the fi lm speed and framing to focus in on speci fi c parts of the image, and to replay short sections repeatedly, often producing a strange, stuttering, strobe effect. Tom Tom is nominally a structuralist fi lm, but perhaps not the kind that you think (the kind that has come to dominate our impression and understanding of the term), even though it was instrumental in establishing the de fi nition. Rose Hobart bears a similar relationship to the category of found footage fi lm – in that it does not quite fi t the de fi nition that it was FOUND FOOTAGE 11 instrumental in establishing. Both fi lms are invoked as seminal, in the case of Rose Hobart we might even say ancestral, for their respective avant-garde categories, for these two different trajectories; of found footage, and of structuralist fi lm. Indeed Rose Hobart has become a kind of foundation myth, or origin story, for found footage fi lm-making and appropriation art more generally. I would argue that both Rose Hobart and Tom Tom , and even Cornell and Jacobs, are attempting to achieve similar goals, and going about it in roughly similar ways. Such an understanding permits a link to be forged between their works, and distinguishes it from the two larger movements with which these fi lms have been respectively, and perhaps to their respective detriment, associated. However, as I have already mentioned, there is much more to this link than perceived similarity. Jacobs has claimed that Tom Tom the Piper’s Son , indeed his whole career post Tom Tom , including his many interrogations of various already-existent fi lm sources, would not have been possible had it not been for his (almost accidental) encounter with Rose Hobart . So, from Jacobs’ mouth we have a very strong claim for a direct guiding in fl uence coming from Cornell. Bearing in mind the very distinctive nature of Jacobs’ work, it seems worthwhile, then, to try to identify what it is that might be shared between these two fi lms, or, at the very least, what is there in the mode of Cornell’s fi lm that might have prompted Jacobs’ perspective shift. Michele Pierson draws a connection between the French philosopher Henri Bergson and Jacobs’ more extreme defamiliarizing strategies, which primarily include the use of strobing and stuttering to create a very distinctive, and for some a very disturbing, sometimes unbearable, viewing experience. The key linkage that she makes is between Jacobs’ stuttering techniques and Bergson’s foundational positioning of intuition as a special way of knowing the world, a way that is superior to conventionally ‘intellectual’ and rational ways of knowing and understanding the world. Art for Bergson offered a privileged way to intuition. Great artworks arise through the intuitive reasoning of the artist, and indeed, for Bergson, the main criterion for great art was its capacity to provide an intuitive glimpse of the real for the viewer. The dif fi culty with intuitive glimpses is that they seldom occur, and when they do they are precisely glimpses – they happen suddenly and do not last for very long. Added to that, humans have distinct problems with maintaining attention, which is perhaps why the notion of a sustained 12 JOSEPH CORNELL VERSUS CINEMA intuition sounds like it might be an oxymoron. Intuitive glimpses would seem to be dif fi cult to provoke and impossible to prolong. The latter dif fi culty may arise from the fact that our minds arguably spend most of the time ignoring things rather than thinking about things, deciding what can be safely ignored, and what details must be focused on because they are relevant or imperative. This model of an ignoring mind crops up in various fi elds; it has a somewhat stable origin in the concept of the proprioceptive system used in neurological science, has been theorized in relation to the moving image in the Deleuzian sensory-motor schema, 8 and has other roots in Jerome Lettvin’s infamous paper on the perceptual fi lters of the frog: ‘What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain’. 9 Based on this motley collection of research, we are in a position to suggest that humans have a set of apperceptive fi lters based on relevance, precedence, newness, and a variety of other factors that highlight one set of sensory information amidst the vast gamut that we process at every moment. The task, for Jacobs, for Bergson, and I would argue, for Cornell, is to get us to look without these fi lters in place (or at least, to temporarily recon fi gure them), and then to maintain that kind of critical attentiveness. Jacobs’ strategy for achieving this, for fi rst of all producing and then prolonging the moment of the intuitive glimpse, depends on the persistent renewal of the image in a manner that attempts to shock one’s nervous system into attending to each fl ash of the image as new, as an image that it is imperative to read, but practically unhooked from the rest of the sequence, resulting in the possibility of removing some of those fi lters. This strategy, which we can trace back as far as Tom Tom the Piper’s Son , has more recently been consolidated into a patented digital process that Jacobs has dubbed eternalism . The patent document reveals the process to be stunning in its simplicity. It is facilitated by the digital, but by no means the product of complex algorithmic trickery. Put simply, it consists of the sequential and repetitive patterning of extracted fi lm frames. Groups of two extracted frames (A and B) are separated by a newly introduced third solid colour frame (C). The new set of three frames is now played repeatedly, producing the characteristic strobe effect. This group can then be integrated into larger, more complex sequences of loops, containing multiple groups. 10 Jacobs’ work is rooted in a politically, historically and culturally engaged desire to see, and to help others to see, the past as a real place, populated FOUND FOOTAGE 13 by real people. But not only the past – the same kinds of fi lters and blockages that we have in relation to the distant past also apply to the disregarded present. ‘I really think it’s about penetration to the sublime, to the in fi nite, to an abyss within the commonplace, and the joyful return and appreciation of the richness of the commonplace’. 11 The ‘abyss within the commonplace’ – our fi rst suggestion of the thing that is half known and half unknown, a double-natured object, whose two natures necessarily obscure each other. Return to the Scene of the Crime , Jacobs’ 2008 fi lm, is a digital re-working of the same source footage