Joseph Cornell
Nacimiento : 1903-12-24, Nyack, New York, USA
Muerte : 1972-10-29
Historia
Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, cared for his parents and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
Director
"Cornell's editing has not been tampered with. It is sometimes minimal (the editing), sometimes extensive, always sensitive. I did not change it, as when I did the entire re-edit of Cornell's Legend for Fountains. JACK'S DREAM, for instance, is a puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots from other material - just enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. Whereas CARROUSEL is a fully edited animal piece. There is no way now of determining the order in which the films were made, or even the exact years, but it was some time in the '40s." -Larry Jordan in 2003
Himself
Lawrence Jordan's portrait of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.
Editor
A short film where circus performers entertain children.
Producer
A short film where circus performers entertain children.
Writer
A short film where circus performers entertain children.
Director
A short film where circus performers entertain children.
Director
"Slightly symbolic and strangely lyric."–Alex Katz, Art News.
Director
Director
Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.
Director of Photography
A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.
Director
A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park at the New York Public Library as a stage set for the fantasy inclusion of a certain nymph. A meditation on an ephemeral day in the the life of a park shared by birds, the young and the old.
Director
A sombre day in the city.
Director
Short film by Rudy Burckhardt and Joseph Cornell.
Director
A collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary is an impression of Union Square. The location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film, he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.
Director
A film composed of the out-takes from Brakhage’s The Wonder Ring (1955), which Cornell had commissioned. There has been a long-standing misconception that the film "Gnir Rednow" is simply "The Wonder Ring" mirrored or projected in reverse. However, Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive has definitively established that the original roll of each one of these two films is "unmistakably, completely comprised of camera original Kodachrome," and that no two shots are precisely the same from one film to the other.
Director
Centuries of June, perhaps more than any Cornell film, is a naked attempt to capture the soul of a place and the mood of a disappearing moment.
Director
Smoke, sparks and steam dance together in Cornell's found-footage collage. Backwards title cards (or an alien language, if you like) punctuate this mishmash of the industrial and the ancient.
Director
Rare film by Joseph Cornell.
Director
"I have not changed the editing structure. I have made the films printable. They are the first known fully collaged films, i.e., films made from found footage, and were done sometime in the ‘40s. Cornell combines Vaudeville jugglers, animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. He collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard – impossible – to describe. But it’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art." —Larry Jordan
Director
Director Joseph Cornell evokes the nostalgia of childhood by filming a children's party.
Director
A montage of elephants, children, Native Americans, logging, a barnstormer, a blimp, people on and in the water, and a man who sings like a bird.
Director
A lucid dream turned nightmarish reality. A ship sinking into a world of fear. A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of America's most prolific twentieth century artists.
Director
A short made by Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s-- An ode to imagination, travel and literature. In true Cornellian fashion, the film borrows footage from, among other films, a Burton Holmes travelogue; Sightseeing tours of Dutch Marken and agrarian Asia therefore become the dream of a boy at a bookstall.
Director
El interés por la descontextualización de imágenes propia del collage lleva a Joseph Cornell a poner en práctica una combinación de cine de metraje encontrado y estrategias surrealistas de combinación de materiales ajenos, entre la fascinación por el espectáculo y la nostalgia.
Director
Carousel - Animal Opera (c.1938), a visual symphony by artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell.
Editor
Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.
Director
Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.
Director
Joseph Cornell's original compilation from his own film collection is based on the low-budget slapstick cartoons produced in the 1920s and 1930s by the Weiss Brothers, which Cornell turns into a parody of newsreels through subtle textual intervention.
Director
In Vaudeville Deluxe, Cornell assembles footage of performers, like a man who balances in his mouth a frame that supports a seated woman.
Director
Joseph Cornell film from 1957, color.
Director
Joseph Cornell film from 1955, black & white.
Director
Short film by Joseph Cornell, date unknown, color, silent
Director
Joseph Cornell film from 1957, color
