Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema

Michael Pigott is Assistant Professor of Video Art and Digital Media, a post shared equally across the departments of History of Art, Film and Television Studies and the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

• IntroductionCinephilia - Rose Hobart (1936)Cinematic Space and Time - Angel (1957), GniR RednoW (1955)Found Footage an the Remix - Jack's Dream (1938)Texture and Affect - By Night with Torch and Spear (1942)ConclusionDetailed Filmography and List of Sources

Compared to other aspects of Joseph Cornell’s art practice, remarkably little has been written about his films. Michael Pigott, in his rich and provocative engagement with these screen works, suggests that this critical silence “arises at least partly from the difficulty in accounting for [them] within contemporary frameworks.” These are films, he argues, that operate as “solutions to problems that have only now become apparent as such”—films whose significance and resonance we can now, from the vantage point of intervening decades, begin to unpack. Drawing inspiration from (among others) Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of anarchaeology and Michel Foucault’s archaeological investigations of sociocultural stutters and abrasions, Pigott proposes positioning Cornell as a central figure in “an alternate history of the twentieth century.” In this Cornellian century, the filmmaker takes his rightful place as a key antecedent of, or influential figure within, numerous movements or strains of practice: “revelationist” film, remix culture, slow cinema.