Recycled Images

The subjects of this chapter—Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) and Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Times Five (1968–1973)—are both disjunctive, repetitive films created from the reediting of other, preexisting works. In this, they are collage films, participating in and informing an aesthetics of collage as opposed to montage. Many critics use the term “montage” (rather than collage) when referring to the use of explicit juxtaposition in film. ¹ When it comes to the medium of film, this distinction is important. A difficulty arises in any attempt to discuss collage in the context of film, imbedded in the very form of the medium. All film is literally made up of “montage,” in the specific sense of the material linking together of a succession of still images. What we now think of as montage is one particularly condensed type of filmic sequence that makes evident leaps in temporal or narrative continuity. Contemporary film viewers are constantly expected to make such leaps in order to keep up with the narrative of the film. In this, a material reality of filmmaking becomes imbued with narrative convention—and, to precisely that extent, montage may be not at all unrelated to a more standard or expected series of shots that can reinforce or bolster narrative rather than disrupting it. As I discussed in Chapter 1, theorists of the classical Hollywood cinema regard the montage sequence as a key technique to forward film narrative. ² I privilege the term collage rather than montage in this chapter because the force of the latter often results in a progression or a “leading-up-to” of an event. In conventional, narrative film, it is often used in order to move through time or events rapidly, or to make something quickly apparent that could not be shown easily—or at all—through standard narration, whether for reasons of audience interest or censorship (consider, for instance, the clichéd example of a montage of trains running through tunnels, rushing water, etc. to substitute for an image of explicit sexuality). I contend that collage film (as opposed to a standard montage sequence) forcefully and purposefully disrupts narrative continuity through its juxtapositional techniques and that, at least for the films under consideration here, it does so in order to critique sociopolitical conditions—specifically, in these films, the gendered relations—of contemporary American society. Both films discussed here feature almost 135exclusively the images of a single woman, and each severely distorts the intent of its source film in order to make a powerful comment on female images and political, historical, and aesthetic image-making. Employing collage to recall film’s exhibitionistic history, Cornell and Conner, in very different ways, expose the insidious narratives that commercial cinema tells about women. ³