Rose Hobart (1936)
There's a version of this review where I open with genuine respect for the avant-garde tradition, tip my hat to the academics, and ease you gently into my reservations. But honestly? Twenty minutes of a bloke cutting up someone else's footage and slowing it down isn't something I can dress up with diplomatic language. Rose Hobart is a curiosity that film studies courses adore, and sitting through it, I found myself wondering why.
The setup, if you can call it that, is this: Joseph Cornell took a 1931 jungle melodrama, stripped out the plot, the context, the other characters, and most of the coherent editing, and reassembled what remained into a kind of slow, hypnotic fixation on its lead actress. That's genuinely it. There's no script, no original footage, no narrative thread to follow. Just Rose Hobart's face, again and again, displaced from everything that once gave her performance meaning.
And historians do love it. You'll read about it being the first fan video, a pioneering act of cinematic collage, a proto-surrealist statement. I understand the argument. I just don't buy it.
Because when you actually sit with it, rather than reading about it, the experience is a deeply odd one, and not in an illuminating way. Cornell slows the footage, strips the sound, and loops Hobart's expressions until she stops feeling like a person and starts feeling like an object. Something pinned to a board. There's a mood to it, I'll grant him that. The dreamlike pacing creates a kind of unease that's genuinely effective in isolated moments. But mood without purpose only gets you so far, and this film runs out of road very quickly.
What bothers me most isn't the strangeness. I've got time for strange. What bothers me is the passivity of the whole enterprise. Cornell didn't write a word or direct a single actor. He took another filmmaker's work and arranged it to suit his own very specific obsession with one woman's face. That might be artistically interesting as a concept sketched in a notebook. As a film I'm expected to engage with critically, it falls apart. It doesn't honour Hobart's performance so much as erase its context and flatten her into an image. There's something uncomfortably voyeuristic about the whole thing, and I found it difficult to shake that feeling.
It is, at least, watchable. That's not nothing. And if you're a committed fan of surrealism or the history of experimental film, there's enough atmosphere here to hold your attention for its brief runtime. It's a film that earns its place in the footnotes. I'm just not persuaded it deserves more than that.
For comparison, the 1930s were producing genuinely thrilling, original work around this time. I loved The Invisible Man (1933), a film that was formally inventive and emotionally alive, and that actually had something to say. Rose Hobart sits in a very different category: historically curious, creatively inert, and far less profound than its reputation suggests.
One star. A scrapbook dressed up as cinema.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1936 | Watched: 2026-07-09
