Kim Novak: Bell Book Vertigo Stewart 1958 and above all the clothes...

What can one say about this weird sometimes amazing actress Kim Novak? She delivers four amazing performances in two movies made in 1958. She exudes a weird melancholy and could be a genius; her embodiment of Gillian the Witch in BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE is one of my favorite femme fatale performances, even when her character is a self-righteous sanctimonious bitch to rival Merle or browbeating cronies and longing to be normal and go to goddamned church. VERTIGO recently crested the AFI 100 ahead of KANE, and she's no small measure of its success, even if her love interest is Jimmy Stewart.

She didn't even need magic, all she needed was great clothes.

More than nearly any other actress, she knew how to let great clothes mold her performance--each dress conjures a whole new being. Contrast her assured beatnik grace as she slides around her boho apartment in the beginning with her frump-shouldered white dress shyness at the end in BELL, how we want to do what Scottie did to her in VERTIGO, get her out of the white and dress her back up in the oversize black sweater, bare feet, and tight slacks; or her elegant mannequin black dress against the red velvet restaurant in the beginning VERTIGO with that awful lime green thing she has on in her second incarnation, her brown-red hair pulled back to accentuate her weird nose like her whole head is pulled back from that nose, and the dress a size too big like its a reproachful mother. She was confident enough in her beauty to let it slide when it suited the moment, the clothes, the hair. No wonder she had a breakdown when Jimmy kept forcing her to dress like Madeline again, who would she have to be now that her past role was being exhumed, forcing her in a way to be jealous of herself or to have to live a character for an entire relationship. Beware the hot vain girl for when her mask finally comes off there's a naive person who's never been seen underneath, afraid and abashed by her absence of model pose armament, her magic.

Hence the above collage, positing her as a goddess in the flames of acolyte devotion, the Buddhist demon mask the middle persona between her beauty and the fear-inducing guardians of the gates as you pass beyond time and space. As all good goddesses and their flocks must go, clutching their memories of the hot first incarnation of her witch in BELL to see them through.

Rose Hobart, a name that is known to us... even in the wilds of Second Avenue.

Don't know why I'm obsessed with this whole EAST OF BORNEO / ROSE HOBART thing lately... maybe... maybe... no, that can't be it.

Rose Hobart Variations #4: The Mecha-Medusa Complex

Mecha Medusa!

Goddess of despair. She how sea weeps... crocodile tears
the carpet with her ice like smoke and her bad press.

East of Borneo, Rose Hobart (1931) and Thou (2008)

Joseph Cornell did the first youtube video "remix" or "sweded" or whatever the kids are callin' it, back in the day (1931), and it's seeable here. Name of ROSE HOBART. Instead of remixing the Shining to be a cuddly comedy about "Jack" to cite a popular youtube example, American surrealist Joseph Cornell sweded a 1931 jungle romantic action film name of EAST OF BORNEO.

I actually found out about Cornell's HOBART by accident - wandering into the original EAST OF BORNEO at a showing in the Whitney during an Edward Hopper retrospective. I didn't get the whole ROSE HOBART thing and now I presume that was why EAST was being shown, with HOBART probably on afterwards, as Cornell was in the same curatorial rubric as Hopper, presumably.

I don't think its original director (George Melford) would be happy about how BORNEO got into the Whitney (i.e. you're only art when someone else uses you for paint) but at least it did, and before I was dragged from the theater by my impatiently hissing ex-girlfriend, I fell in love with BORNEO and became determined to find it on tape. The years dragged fruitlessly on, digital revolutions occured, and I finally found it on DVD... at a snazzy little joint called Sinister Cinema, and it's still available for order here. I'd recommend ordering it from these fine folks on DVD-R, rather than netflix the Alpha version (which was probably ripped from an old VHS tape of Sinister's version.)

The point is, you don't need Cornell to remaster BORNEO to get a sense of its outsider poetry brilliance. Godard would point it out for you. If he was in the room. Which he wont be. But you can still glean lots of weird juicy metatextual poetry off it, if you approach in the right frame of mind. To wit, as an artistic salute to Cornell's original cinema "remix" I made the above "collages" by smudging a still from BORNEO, which I ripped off someone else's site.

That begs an interesting question. In the case of BORNEO. Who owns what? How can Cornell copyright HOBART or how can an image or still that's scanned and put up on the internet suddenly "belong" to anyone? Surely, anyone can show it. BORNEO is apparently in the public domain, and anyone can take footage from an old dupe and make their own HOBART if they want. Or take a HOBART and make their own BORNEO. Can't they? So go ahead... cut up the precious lifestuff that is EAST OF BORNEO, and live... live to metatextualize another day.