You can view a better copy at the National Film Preservation Foundation, from which the following text is taken:
Not for decades would there be another film remotely resembling Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, first screened at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in December 1936. The audience apparently found it unintelligible and inept, with the significant exception of Salvador Dalí — in town for the Museum of Modern Art’s surrealist show — who grew so enraged that he kicked over the 16mm projector, which Cornell himself was operating. Dalí, the most envious of artists, had some idea of what Cornell had achieved.
Joseph Cornell (1903–72) is now recognized as one of America’s major twentieth-century artists. He is known for his carefully crafted glass-fronted boxes containing enigmatic arrangements of found objects and images. Rose Hobart, also something of a rearranged found object, is one of his few films completed alone. (In the 1950s and 1960s, he made at least twenty others in collaboration with younger avant-garde filmmakers Rudy Burckhardt, Larry Jordan, and Stan Brakhage.)
If Cornell was an artist who couldn’t paint, he may also have been the first independent filmmaker to make a film without touching a camera. The montage of editing became his way of bringing the collage principle of his boxes into filmmaking. Rose Hobart is essentially a reediting of a ludicrous 1931 jungle melodrama titled East of Borneo — also known as Ourang and White Captive — with a few shots from unidentified other films added. Among Cornell’s collecting passions were old movies, and he had bought 16mm prints by the pound at a New Jersey warehouse. His film is named for East of Borneo’s lead actress, Rose Hobart, who becomes the locus of vague evocations of desire and dread. His edit is rough and disconcerting: Shots begin just as scenes are fading out, glances have uncertain objects, continuity is mismatched.
However, Cornell also would make three alterations when exhibiting the film that helped to give his fragments a strange coherence. He showed the black-and-white film through a piece of colored glass. He turned off the sound and projected it at so-called “silent speed.” (Sound films are standardized at 24 frames per second; most 16mm projectors have a “silent speed” option at 16 to 18 frames per second.) Finally, he provided musical accompaniment in the form of Brazilian samba records bought from a remainder bin.
