A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but, since it was included in ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’ list, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, it was probably one of the weirdest movies I have seen. Indeed, I knew nothing about it before watching it and I was really struggling to figure out what the hell was going on. There was no introduction whatsoever, the cuts between the different scenes were just so weird and jarring and there was no dialogue or inter-titles. I was thinking that, maybe they messed up the production and didn’t manage to properly finish this movie. Eventually, I was really amazed to discover that it was actually done on purpose. I had never heard of her before but the lovely lady constantly showing up randomly was actually really called Rose Hobart and she was apparently a B actress in the 30’s. The director Joseph Cornell had then recut one of her movies called ‘East or Borneo’ and added some blue filter. So, it was actually some kind of surreal experiment, not a classic narrative picture, resulting into something rather unique. I apparently didn’t see it with the original soundtrack added by Cornell but what he chose was just annoying and didn’t fit his edit at all. He was apparently fairly obsessed with Hobart, endlessly putting the focus on her and he removed pretty much everything else from this movie which seemed to be rather unremarkable in the first place.  From all the experimental shorts I have seen, it was not the most fascinating one, far from it, but I have to admit that the approach was still really intriguing, that’s for sure.