The Persistence of Cocteau

Over the next couple of days I will be making some comments about the first two films of the unit, Rose Hobart and Le Sang d'un poète, but first a musical interlude.


Here is Stereolab's "Cybele's Reverie," from their 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup. For those of you who have watched Le Sang d'un poète, some of the images in this video will be uncannily familiar. You might think of the homage to Cocteau entangled in this video's collage as embodying Victor Burgin's description of film as something no longer merely experienced within the context of a "visit" -- to the cinema, for instance -- but rather to be "encountered" in various forms and fragments, creating a multitude of new contexts and memories through these various encounters. The video records something of the experience of these encounters, and of what Burgin calls the "sequence-image." It situates Cocteau among other vintage film moments, crafting its "reverie" from the sense of "pastness" all memory instills and all reverie exploits.

A Mascot: Tilly Losch.

The image to the right is a detail from one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, Tilly Losch.

Cornell's name for the work remembers a Viennese actor and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films of the thirties and forties as well as in a wide variety of dance and avant garde theatrical performances. She was later a painter.

Cornell suspends Tilly in time: she embodies both the spectacle of performance and the attentive spectator at work, held or animated by a fragile collection of threads. She sits amidst, or aloft, the sublime spectacle of alps. Miniaturised and poised, Tilly has a body that is still and yet in action. She is seated in a space whose contours describe a simulated theatre; inside and outside, her location mid-air makes her half-audience, half-curtain (raiser).

You can find more information about Joseph Cornell here, here, and here, and we will kick off the unit with a film by Cornell, Rose Hobart. You can view it here.

You can find more information about Tilly Losch here.