Unreal Newsreels

Short film with sound by Rudy Burckhardt, assembled from the footage shot by Joseph Cornell for his own silent "Mulberry Street."

One of Joseph Cornell’s funniest films, Thimble Theater is structured like a vaudeville variety show about nature.

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.

A sombre day in the city. "A Legend for Fountains" is the 16-minute version, "A Fable for Fountains" the 6-minute version.

Short film of a statue of an angel by an ornamental pond on a summer's day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shorter version with sound

Slightly different version of Cornell's Mulberry Street. Scenes of Mulberry Street on New York City's Lower East Side, as seen from the point of view of a bust of Mozart sitting in a store window.

In Vaudeville Deluxe, Cornell assembles footage of performers, like a man who balances in his mouth a frame that supports a seated woman. (Release date is approximately 1940s.)