Filming Degree Zero

Filming Degree Zero
for Joseph Cornell

“Me? I pursue an
image, no more.”
—Gérard de Nerval

“The still offers us
the inside of the fragment.”
—Roland Barthes,
“The Third Meaning,”
Image-Music-Text

Boxes as "Stills"

Cornell’s boxes institute a reading that is at once instantaneous & vertical—it scorns cinematic narrative “talkie” horizontal time.

The boxes are “stills”—still-shots that show us how to dissociate technical restraint from what is cinematically indescribable: the “third meaning.”

The boxes are “silent” screenplays—they’re “stills” from a film that isn’t simply seen & heard cinematically, but rather stops in time & space so that the “fragment” can be scrutinized and listened to attentively.

This seeing & hearing enables the “box” to be a “still” that’s a “ready-made” object, a ready-made scene within a film that exists in a new way, i.e., thru the “third meaning” which is vertical not horizontal narrative.

This Barthes-esque “third meaning” has its own way of structuring the film differently as Cornell does creating his “Rose Hobart” (1936) film out of the “East of Borneo” (1931) talkie motion picture.

Cornell’s “third meaning” emerges with the “stills” & condensed imagery of “Rose Hobart” (19 minutes)—compared that of Borneo (77 minutes).

Cornell’s “film” begins only when language & “talkie” metalanguage ends.

Everything that can be said about “East of Borneo” can be said in a written text entitled “Borneo”—except this third or “obtuse” meaning. One can gloss everything in “Borneo” except the obtuse quality of Rose Hobart’s face, her gestures, her actions.

This obtuse filmic lies in the region where Rose Hobart herself pauses, stops, smiles, looks, moves, lives & performs for us her own story—and language or cinematic dialog or the soundtrack can’t really describe this third world of nuanced, obtuse meaning that’s seeable but not describable. Except with Cornell’s surreal aesthetics & readymade filmics..

“The emphatic truth—
of gesture in the important
moments of life”
—Baudelaire

Language seems to go thru a dark passage to beauty but the creative act of the filmic itself seems to find a way. Since we’ve been forced to see movies as “talkies” rather than “silent” stills (boxes)—is it any wonder that the filmic should be so rare?

A few flashes come from Cornell’s work—perhaps elsewhere? Not much though—so that one might have to say that the “filmic” doesn’t exist—there’s only “talkie” cinematic language, cinematic narrative, cinematic dialog, cinematic plots, cinematic acting, cinematic direction.

The cinematic isn’t the same as the silent surrealist filmic—it’s as far removed from the filmic as the novelistic is from the novel. Can write & exist in the novelistic—while not writing novels?

Paradoxically, the filmic doesn’t seem to be able to be grasped while its happening, in the movement, in its “motion picture” state—but only as artifact, the “still.” Perhaps Cornell sensed this after “Rose Hobart”—and concentrated on his surreal boxes after that?

After Miss Dali acted out her bitch-scene tipping over the projector & then complaining that Cornell had telepathically stolen the same “Rose Hobart” idea for a film from him, well…can one blame Cornell from concentrating on surreal box-art after that?

What is a still? A photo from a film? Something from the pages of Cahiers du cinema? Pictures in a textbook? A department store catalog? A pornographic picture from “My Baby Is Black”?

What if the so-called obtuse filmic lies not in movement or catalogs of picture books or porno? What if a diegetic horizon is needed to “freeze-frame” & configure the filmic mobility theoretically as a framework for a presentational unfolding combining the stills with a story (diegesis) so that a new “third obtuse meaning” is born from the lower depths?

In some ways this has already happened with graphic novels & comix. Such innovations represent the “still-shot” as filmic when “doubled” within a series of frames not necessarily arranged horizontally but rather vertically. As with this Crazy Kat cartoon. Notice it’s vertical storytelling schematic.



The last “still” of Krazy Kat in the pond offers us the inside-story as a fragment of the whole vertical narrative. In this shot the center of gravity is no longer between horizontal frames of other stills but rather “inside the shot”—the accentuation of the last fragment expands the absurdity of the whole story.



This vertical “diegesis-complexity” lies with accentuation within the fragment—as Cornell does with his vertical boxes composed of various “frames.” Each box has a vertical reality of articulation—as opposed to the cinematic horizontal narrative effect.

Cornell’s vertical filmic narrative is at once parodic & absurd. The obtuse or third meaning isn’t “a specimen chemically extracted from the substance of the film,” but rather “a trace of a supercilious bits, hints, clues” experienced in a “stop-action” still-shot.

The “stop-action” still-shot is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment. Both film & still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without being o top of each other or extracted from each other. There’s a surreal co-existence of images—doing their Cornell box-thing.

The “still” throws off the constraint of cinematic time—as with Cornell’s boxes which aesthetically as well as technically & theoretically like a silent text or screenplay that’s not committed to logico-temporal order when readymade time is free.

The “still,” Cornell’s boxes, institute a readymade reading at once both instantaneous & vertical—what happens when this happens?

Cornell’s boxes as well as his “Rose Hobart”—perform a vertical mutation of filming degree zero. But what is that?

Boxes & Film

Boxes of wood and glass—
Little intricate worlds in a shoebox,
With plenty of night & day inside.

Movie stills with real objects—
Detritus for every moment,
Used, unused & abused.

Photos, maps, money—
Stamps, pins & needles:
Tidbits of time...

Memory cinema—
Without tacky soundtracks
And stupid kitschy dialog.

Hollywood studios—
Cages for movie stars
Norma Desmond wannabes.

My own voice echoes—
In the four corners of the box
Shadows play hide-and-seek.

Volcanoes burn in mirrors—
Eclipses come & go silently
Rose Hobart, Borneo doomed.

One has to commit a box—
The way one commits a murder
Objects try but fail to hurry away.

Slot machines of chance—
Conversations come & say goodbye
Bijous of creeps & crocodiles.

Minimal, surreal fragments—
Your own record of ruined romances
The same as Hollywood History.

Theater of neo-narrative—
Sliding causality & closure thru
The usual sliced eyeball.

The cruelty of Mexican boyz—
Buñuel’s Los Olvidados hustlers
Futile gestures in the ghetto.

The indiscrete charm—
Of young Destroying Angels
Locked away in a cathedral box.

Apparitions as manifestos—
For closet-cases Breton & Dali
Black magic of the absurd.

Joseph Cornell’s boxes—
No music or unnecessary words
Just the visible moment.

Filming Degree Zero II
—for Joseph Cornell

“I decided I liked photography
in opposition to the cinema,
from which I nonetheless
failed to separate it.”
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Is Barthes cinephobic? Like Joseph Cornell? Mistrusting the hypnotic spell exerted by cinematic narrative?

When equating a film—with its story & interpretation, is the third meaning, the obtuse meaning, the surrealist meaning lost?

Barthe’s “obtuse meaning”—isn’t that what Cornell does? He has this lover’s discourse, this quarrel with “talkies” cinema as opposed to silent film & stills?

It seems to me to be that way with Cornell’s treatment of the early “talkie” film “”East of Borneo” (1931)—criss-cutting, condensing, removing the sound track. Changing the frame-speed to the silent film level when creating his surreal film “Rose Hobart” (1936).

That & the fact that Cornell spent so much of his life after “Rose Hobart” down in his NYC basement studio constructing his surreal “boxes”—which could very well remind one of movie stills—3D scenes from an ongoing surreal readymade film of his surreal “secret flix” (Jack Smith) imagination.

I see both “Rose Hobart” & Cornell’s boxes as example of Barthes’ “Writing Degree Zero”—in the sense that Barthes’ obtuse and/or third meaning concepts can be applied along the lines of “Filming Degree Zero.”

Filming Degree Zero III
—for Joseph Cornell

“For most criticism, by equating a
film with its story and interpretation
fails to acknowledge that this “third”
meaning can exist on any level at all”
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Barthes
and Film,” Placing Movies

This third meaning that Barthes defines as the “obtuse meaning that can proceed only by appearing and disappearing”—what is it?

In some ways isn’t it the face of Garbo, the face of Brigitte Bardot, the face of Audrey Hepburn—and the face of Rose Hobart?

The critical faculty of the moviegoer—isn’t that what’s being invoked in this third obtuse meaning sense in a surreal film or Cornell readymade box?

Loosening the “talkie” cinematic, narcissistic, suspended-belief glue’s grip on filmic consciousness?
The hypnosis of verisimilitude, the suspension of disbelief that makes cinema so narcissistic?

Silent film, the still image, Cornell’s readymade boxes—is this the obtuse, third meaningful, perverse way out?

Filming Degree Zero IV
—for Joseph Cornell

“When he reached the other
side of the bridge, the phantoms
came to greet him.”
—F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922)

The idea that surrealist film not only includes “Rose Hobart” (1936)—but the readymade boxes of Joseph Cornell as well... That future cineastes such as Jack Smith would pick up on this filmic idea and use Cornell’s surrealist insights—filming his own degree zero movies like “Flaming Creatures” (1961) in NYC back during the “Midnight Movies” period of experimental American cinema.

The idea of adding kitschy camp to the repertoire of the surreal filmmaking process is nothing new—but American kitsch added gay connotations to surreal cinema very different in many ways from Breton’s patriarchal straight-laced hetero-straitjacketed surrealist manifesto agenda.

Jack Smith’s kitschy surrealism was closer to the Thirties Lesbos-Parisian surrealism of Gertrude Stein-Djuna Barnes-Mina Loy—with such works as “Nightwood,” “The Lost Lunar Baedker” and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

The 19-year-old Smith was an usher at the Orpheum Theater in Chicago in 1951—when Maria Montez’s untimely death inspired the management to undertake an extended festival of her films. It was then that Smith fell in love with Montez like Cornell fell in love with Rose Hobart.

Only in America could people believe that Maria Montez was Cobra Woman, Siren of Atlantis and Scheherazade. Jack Smith also became entranced with most Dorothy Lamour sarong flix—in that turbulent Sixties milieu along with other cult film intelligentsia: Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jonas Mekas, Stan Braklage, Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, etc.

These filmmakers shared the surrealists’ taste for the tawdry exoticism of despised film genres—junky spectacles, cheap horror flicks, anonymous pornography.

For example, Jack Smith’s “The Perfect Film Appositeness of Maria Montez” argued that the acme of cinematic expressiveness is to be found in a series of exotic, juvenile swashbucklers produced at Universal studios during World War II as vehicles for Maria Montez.

The same with the surrealist’s favorite movie Josef von Sternberg’s “The Shanghai Gesture” (1941)—which they improvised into delirious fantasy elaborations based on their “irrational enlargement” filmic method.

Filming Degree Zero V
—for Joseph Cornell

The Surrealist Group

Luis Buñuel (LB)
Joseph Cornell (JC)
Jack Smith (JS)
John Waters (JW)
Ed Wood Jr. (EW)

Data Towards the Irrational
Enlargement of “The Shanghai Gesture”

In this Barthesian “obtuse” experimental film treatment of von Sternberg’s classic, the fairly straight hetero Surrealist Group is replaced by other surrealists—and the irrational enlargement shifts to a more perverse, decadent derisory impudent concrete criticism with totally automatic responses, of course, that bein the sole criterion for this study.

What is Poppy’s perversion?

“Clasping an octopus tightly to her distraught pussy with her kimono pulled up & thighs smeared with lots of greasy K-Y.” (LB)

“Stretched out spread-eagled on the green felt of a backroom pool table, as Victor Mature detaches pearl after pearl from Poppy’s damp pouty convulsing pussy.” (JW)

“Poppy has no sexual perversion other than the intense sensuality she gets on a poker table surrounded by cynical Shanghai gangster card players & a cocaine-intoxicated handsome young sailor on a lucky streak.” (JL)

“As Poppy permits a Peking pinhead to slowly stick his tiny sleek dwarf shiny shaved head up her tight moaning & groaning pussy in the hushed silence of Mother Gin-Sling’s personal private parlor.” (JS)

“Fellatio of a self-confessed, intensely masochistic nature beneath a bronze Shiva in the bathroom making the whole gambling joint tremor, premature ejaculations swallowed by greedy goldfish in the nearby toilet bowl, as an octopus winds its tentacles around her legs, while men in the casino suddenly get s whiff of a strange odor of distraught pussy emanating from beneath all the gaming tables with Poppy down there on he knees between the legs of the croupier’s legs. (EW)

“Purposeful masturbation with a peacock feather—that once belonged to Rudolf Valentino and was used by an arrogant smirking slave boy who tortured the Sheik mercilessly in his tent late into the intense desert hashish night there in his secret tent of horrible decadent jaded male desire.” (LB)

“In a Japanese sushi-bar aquarium way down there in the bottom of the sea where sunken Spanish galleons & old Greek temples lollygag in the silent Atlantis seabed abyss of Laundromat dirty gossip, scuttling crabs and the Forty Thieves’ homeboy where Poppy is ravished day & night by hoodlum LA gangs & pimply-faced runaways from the Poughkeepsie suburbs.” (JS)