‘Rose Hobart’: The movie Salvador Dalí accused the creator of stealing from his dream
Befitting his reputation as one of surrealism’s defining figures, Salvador Dalí was adamant that almost 75 years before the release of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, he’d been the victim of a subconscious robbery that saw his dreams subjected to a daring heist.
It sounds completely and utterly nonsensical, but that neatly sums up the nature of his ties to Rose Hobart. The experimental short drew its name from the actor of the same name, who made one of her most memorable big screen appearances in 1931’s East of Borneo, which turned out to be a source of endless fascination for Joseph Cornell.
Hobart played the role of Linda Randolph, who found herself plunged into an adventure through the island’s treacherous jungles while on the search for her missing husband, only to discover that he’s alive, well, and cranking out a solid 9-to-5 as the personal physician of Borneo’s Prince Hashim, which swiftly instigates a dangerous love triangle.
It may not sound like something that Dalí would dream about, but it became just that when experimental filmmaker and visual artist Cornell entered the fray. East of Borneo, in its original form, runs for 77 minutes, but he seemingly couldn’t be bothered revisiting the movie in its entirety despite his borderline obsession with its leading lady.
Instead, he purchased a print of East of Borneo from a second-hand shop and took the scissors to it. He removed great swathes of the footage, placed scenes in non-sequential order, spliced in some sequences from nature films, and whittled it right down to 19 minutes, largely comprised of shots featuring Hobart, which is how he stumbled upon his imaginative retitling.
To make things even stranger, Cornell screened Rose Hobart through a shard of blue glass, slowed down the framerate to that of a silent film, and inserted two songs from the soundtrack taken from Holiday in Brazil, a 1957 album by composer, conductor, singer, and occasional actor Nestor Amaral.
During a public showing in New York City, Dalí was present and became so furious at his dreams being raided for inspiration that he toppled the projector before it even had a chance to finish. “My idea for a film is exactly that,” he raged, convinced that Cornell had developed the means to turn his own sleeping mind against him and use it as a fountain for his own creative endeavours.
Of course, the artistic icon was forced to admit he “never wrote it down or told anyone,” but still, “it is as if he had stolen it.” Only Cornell truly knew if he had actually developed a method of stealthily infiltrating Dalí’s dreamlike state to blatantly steal his idea for what basically equated to a Hobart fan film at the end of the day, but he took that secret to his grave and never shared whether or not he truly held such abilities.
