The Invisible Cathedrals of Joseph Cornell
By Jonas Mekas

How to write about the movies of Joseph Cornell? Where can I find such lightness and grace and unpretentiousness and directness? My typewriter is here, in front of me, very real. The paper, the keys. I’m searching for words, letter by letter. To pay a tribute to a unique artist.

One amazing part of Joseph Cornell’s film work –and he is the first one to stress this and remind us of it- is that a number of other people have been involved in the making of his films, either in photographing them or editing them. But when you see them (nine were shown at the Anthology Film Archives weekend before last), the same unmistakable Cornellian qualities mark them all. I spoke with Stan Brakhage, who did camera work on a few Cornell movies, and he said, yes, I held the camera, but I was only a medium who followed every indication, every movement, every suggestion that Cornell made: Cornell didn’t touch the camera, but he made my every movement, he took every shot. Rudy Burckhardt, who photographed a good number of other Cornells, relates the same experience.

Yes, the invisible spirit of a great artist hovers over everything he does; a certain movement, a certain quality that he imposes upon everything he touches. When in contact with people, this quality rises again from the work, like a sweet mist, and it touches us, through our eyes, through our mind. Cornell’s mist (art is the opiate of the people…), Cornell’s fragrance is at once unique and at the same time very simple and unimposing. It’s so unimposing that it’s no wonder his movies have escaped, have slipped by unnoticed through the grosser sensibilities of the viewer, the sensibilities of men who need strong and loud bombardment of their senses to perceive anything. What Cornell’s movies are is an essence of the home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. Old people in the parks. A tree full of birds. A girl in a blue dress, looking around, in the street, with plenty of time on her hands. Water dripping into the fountain ring. An angel in the cemeteries, sweetest face, under a tree. A cloud passes over the wing of the angel. What an image. A cloud passes, touching lightly the wing of an angel. The final image of Angel is to me one of the most beautiful metaphors cinema has produced.

Cornell’s images are all very real. Even when they are taken from other movies, as in Rose Hobart, they seem to gain the quality of reality. The Hollywood unreality is transported into Cornellian unreality, which is very, very real. Here is an evidence of the power of the artist to transform reality by choosing, by picking out only those details which correspond to some subtle inner movement or vision, or dream. No matter what he takes, be it a totally “artificial” reality, or bits of “actual reality, he transforms them, bit by bit, into new unities, new things, boxes, collages, movies, with no other thing on earth resembling them. I have seen some of these movies in process of assembling themselves in Cornell’s studio during the years, as they were put together, or maybe as they were putting themselves together from earth’s dream matter, from things that people usually either throw away or don’t pay attention to or pass by without looking, taking them for granted –be it a flock of birds, or an angels’s wing, or a melancholy looking doll in a store window- people are always interested in important matters…

Ah, but do not get misled, either by my writing, the way I’m writing about Cornell’s little movies, nor by the seeming simplicity of the movies themselves: Don’t assume for a moment that they are a work of a “home” artist, a dabbler in cinema. No. Cornell’s movies, like his boxes and his collages, are products of many years of work, of collecting, of polishing, of caring. They grow, like some things of nature grow, little by little, until the time arrives to let them out. It’s like all things that Cornell does. Like his studio, like his basement. I stood in his basement and I looked in amazement at all kinds of little things in incredible number, frames, boxes, reels, little piles of mysterious objects and parts of objects, on walls, on tables, on boxes, and on the floor, in paper bags, and benches and chairs –wherever I looked I saw mysterious things growing, little by little. Some of them were just at the stage of birth, a detail or two, a fragment of a photograph, a toy’s arm; other things in further stages of growth, and still others almost completed, almost breathing (on the table there was a pile of objects a little girl who was visiting the studio months ago spilled out, and he didn’t touched them, he thought the creation was perfect)- the entire place looked like some magic hothouse of buds and flowers of art. And there was Joseph Cornell himself, walking kindly among them, touching one, touching another, adding some detail, or just looking at them, or dusting them off –the Gardener- so they grow into their fragile, sensitive, sublime, and all-encompassing perfections.

Once I was foolish enough to ask Cornell about the exact dates of the completion of his movies. When was Cotillion made? When was Centuries of June made? No, said Cornell, don’t ask for the dates. Dates tie things down to certain points. Yes, when was it made?… Somewhere there… many years… So there I was, a fool, asking a foolish question. The dates! Cornell’s art is timeless, both in its processes of coming (or becoming) and in what it is. His works have the quality –be they boxes, collages, or movies- of being located in some suspended area of time, like maybe they are extensions of our “realness” into some other dimension where our reality can be fixed. Our dimensions come and go, Cornell’s dimensions remain and can always be touched again by sensibilities of those who come and look at his work. Yes, spaces, dimensions. No great surprise to find in Cornell’s work so much geometry and astronomy. It has something to do with retracing our feelings, our thoughts, our dreams, our states of being on some other, very fine dimension from where they can reflect back to us in the language of the music of the spheres.
Or like the girls, the timeless girls of Cornell’s art, they are either angels or children –in any case they are at the age when the time is suspended, doesn’t exist. Nymphs are ageless and so are the angels. A girl of ten, in a blue dress, in a park, with nothing to do, with plenty of time on her hands, looking around, in a timeless dream.

So where was I? I was talking about the movies of Joseph Cornell. Or at least I thought I was talking about them. I will be talking about them for a long time. There aren’t many such sublime things left around us to talk about. Yes, we are talking about cathedrals, civilization. What’s his name? Professor Clark? The cathedrals of today, wherever they are, are very unimposing, very unnoticeable. The boxes, the collages, the home movies of Joseph Cornell are the invisible cathedrals of our age. That is, they are almost invisible, as are all the best things that man can still find today: They are almost invisible, unless you look for them.