John Yau at the Paris Review:
One night John and I go to Tribeca, to a small gallery space on Franklin Street, to see Joseph Cornell’s masterpiece, Rose Hobart (1936), a nineteen-minute collage film made by splicing and reordering segments from East of Borneo (1931), a B-film starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford, along with an educational nature film of an eclipse. A few days earlier, John called and told me that he had read that there was going to be a screening of Cornell’s film, just as he had first shown it at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936, projected through a blue-tinted lens at a slowed down speed consistent with silent films. John thought it would be interesting to see Rose Hobart as Cornell first conceived of it.
According to John, halfway through the debut showing, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí—in a fit of envy, and one of the few in the audience to grasp what Cornell had done—used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, as he stormed out, screaming: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if you had stolen it!”
more here.
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