![]() ![]() Films and fragments of films carry occasional comments: “Wonderful shots of birds” and such. The program, undated, of a more recent session, organized at 9 Great Jones Street in New York, reads as follows:įILMS FROM THE UNIQUE COLLECTION OF JOSEPH CORNELLĬornell, then, was part of that very special and obscure network of collectors, acquiring films through correspondence and auction, buying and exchanging. Cornell, moreover, organized public screenings of his collection on occasion at the Julien Levy Gallery in the 1940s. A great many derive from that remote period called “primitive,” but the collection does include sound films. The group of 100 or so donated in 1971 to the Anthology Film Archives includes a great deal of early work, many anonymous, some by Méliès, Bitzer, Griffith, documentary and educational footage, “features” of the 1920s, 1930s, and later. These transitions will be recapitulated in his own films, endowed, moreover, with that particular immediacy of effect which suggests a dialectic of trauma and fascination.Ĭornell collected films. Witnessing, then, the transition between photography and film, Cornell saw, as well, the appearance of color, the transition from black-and-white to hand-tinted print to technicolor, and the sudden eruption into sound. Bushman, for example-in that other space of the “personal appearance” at a suburban movie theater. This was a child who saw his first films in peepshow, had peered through the framed apertures of stereopticons, and experienced the miraculous apparition, recalled 60 years later, of the star of an early film-Francis X. He had known its ties to the theater, to magic and prestidigitation, its severance, its evolution from still photography. Cornell, born in 1903, witnessing every significant development of the medium, had a particularly rich experience of its genesis and youth-a youth which was his own. Of the circumstances surrounding Cornell’s cinematic work, we know, for a start, that this was a life almost exactly coextensive with film’s life. One can, for the moment, make a beginning, an effort to describe the filmic work, to think about the impulses, the particular qualities of that imagination at work in it, and one can suggest some ways in which it may be comprehended with and through that work more generally known, the boxes and collages. We will have, one day, of course, the detailed and comprehensive study of this extraordinary lifework from the tenacious scholar-detective who will devote himself to uncovering the sources and circumstances of its intricacies, to shattering the silence which Cornell himself spun, like a bell of glass, about it. “It was after hours, and Jennifer Jones was not there, but the set, the atmosphere of things was so wonderful.” Another vivid recollection was Dali’s nakedly expressed jealousy upon the screening of Cornell’s first film Rose Hobart in the Julien Levy Gallery. Two memories precious to him were the yellow covers of an early film magazine sold in a shop kept by a friend of his father’s and the “enchanting” (it was his word, to which we shall return) stroll in Central Park about the set of Portrait of Jennie. This meeting and a number of long conversations were to tell me little about his films, though we talked of other and all sorts of things-of Debussy, the few surviving friends I’d met in the Paris of the ’50s, of Deodat de Severac, whose biography I found upon his desk-but never of the circumstances or consequences of his film-making. The film required cleaning and slight restoration, and time passed, as Cornell wished to receive me in fine, warm weather, when his small garden and its quince tree would bloom. He protested-gently, of course-against the reputation for seclusion which informed that hesitation, and we agreed to see one another and talk eventually, when I had looked at the Feuillade. I then told him that I had been seeing and thinking about his own films, only recently collected and now regularly screened in the Anthology Film Archives’ cycles, that I had wished and hesitated to write, putting some questions that had occurred to me. When I had said something of my astonishment and delight, we began a long conversation, I mostly listening as Cornell talked of early films early seen in nickelodeons, theaters and provincial carnivals. I am not sure it is complete, but I do think it may possibly interest you.” It is yours to see and to do with as you please. I have placed a short film of his on deposit in the Anthology Film Archives. “I also know something of your interest in the films of Louis Feuillade, and I should like to offer you a Christmas gift. “My name is Joseph Cornell, and although we have never met, I believe we know of each other,” he said with an exact and deeply flattering tact. TWO CHRISTMAS DAYS AGO I answered my ringing telephone and received the most generous of season’s greetings from a stranger.
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