Joseph Cornell

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Lawrence Jordan's portrait of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.

In Vaudeville Deluxe, Cornell assembles footage of performers, like a man who balances in his mouth a frame that supports a seated woman. (Release date is approximately 1940s.)

"Cornell's editing has not been tampered with. It is sometimes minimal (the editing), sometimes extensive, always sensitive. I did not change it, as when I did the entire re-edit of Cornell's Legend for Fountains. JACK'S DREAM, for instance, is a puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots from other material - just enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. Whereas CARROUSEL is a fully edited animal piece. There is no way now of determining the order in which the films were made, or even the exact years, but it was some time in the '40s." -Larry Jordan in 2003

Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.

Director Joseph Cornell evokes the nostalgia of childhood by filming a children's party.

Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment.

Smoke, sparks and steam dance together in Cornell's found-footage collage. Backwards title cards (or an alien language, if you like) punctuate this mishmash of the industrial and the ancient.

A sombre day in the city. "A Legend for Fountains" is the 16-minute version, "A Fable for Fountains" the 6-minute version.

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.

Carousel - Animal Opera (c.1938), a visual symphony by artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell.

A film composed of the out-takes from Brakhage’s The Wonder Ring (1955), which Cornell had commissioned. There has been a long-standing misconception that the film "Gnir Rednow" is simply "The Wonder Ring" mirrored or projected in reverse. However, Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive has definitively established that the original roll of each one of these two films is "unmistakably, completely comprised of camera original Kodachrome," and that no two shots are precisely the same from one film to the other.

"I have not changed the editing structure. I have made the films printable. They are the first known fully collaged films, i.e., films made from found footage, and were done sometime in the ‘40s. Cornell combines Vaudeville jugglers, animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. He collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard – impossible – to describe. But it’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art." —Larry Jordan

A short film where circus performers entertain children.

The contents consist mostly of found footage, similar to the repurposed imagery favored by Cornell in his other films. Edited with Cornell’s distinctive splicing tape, the 23-minute film was composed by the artist sometime between 1940 and 1955.

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

A lucid dream turned nightmarish reality. A ship sinking into a world of fear. A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of America's most prolific twentieth century artists.

A montage of elephants, children, Native Americans, logging, a barnstormer, a blimp, people on and in the water, and a man who sings like a bird.

A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.

One of Joseph Cornell’s funniest films, Thimble Theater is structured like a vaudeville variety show about nature.

Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.

A short made by Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s-- An ode to imagination, travel and literature. In true Cornellian fashion, the film borrows footage from, among other films, a Burton Holmes travelogue; Sightseeing tours of Dutch Marken and agrarian Asia therefore become the dream of a boy at a bookstall.

Slightly different version of Cornell's Mulberry Street. Scenes of Mulberry Street on New York City's Lower East Side, as seen from the point of view of a bust of Mozart sitting in a store window.

Joseph Cornell's original compilation from his own film collection is based on the low-budget slapstick cartoons produced in the 1920s and 1930s by the Weiss Brothers, which Cornell turns into a parody of newsreels through subtle textual intervention.

Joseph Cornell's ode to the memory of his friend Joyce Hunter is a meditative series of scenes recorded at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, where Cornell arranged for Hunter to be buried.

Joseph Cornell shot footage on Mulberry Street with Rudolph Burckhardt and made this silent film. Burckhardt would make his own sound version, "What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street," and Cornell would also make Children out of the same material.

Joseph Cornell shot footage on Mulberry Street with Rudolph Burckhardt and made this silent film. Burckhardt would make his own sound version, "What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street," and Cornell would also make Children out of the same material.

Short film with sound by Rudy Burckhardt, assembled from the footage shot by Joseph Cornell for his own silent "Mulberry Street."

A shorter version of Joseph Cornell's Nymphlight, an experimental film shot in New York City's Bryant Park, featuring scenes of birds, fountains, people, etc. Edited to the length of Debussy's prelude of the same name.

Short film by reclusive artist Joseph Cornell, date unknown, colour, silent

Footage shot for Cornell by Rudy Burckhardt in December 1955 of a woman buying chestnuts from a street vendor and watching people and birds in a city square.

Joseph Cornell film from 1957, color.

A short film where circus performers entertain children.

A short film where circus performers entertain children.

A short film where circus performers entertain children.

An untitled Joseph Cornell film from the MOMA collection

3 screen tests by Joseph Cornell.

Joseph Cornell film with input from Rudolph Burckhardt. Also the title to one of Cornell's collages.

A couple on a street corner and in a cafe, birds circling above the city street, window displays in a shop.

Footage shot for Cornell by Rudy Burckhardt in December 1955 of a woman buying chestnuts from a street vendor and watching people and birds in a city square.

Shorter version with sound

An alternate title for Centuries of June