John Ashbery, John Yau, and the movies

John Yau, from “At the Movies with John Ashbery,” an excerpt from a work in progress (The Paris Review ). The subject is the first screening of Joseph Cornell’s film Rose Hobart :

According to John, halfway through the debut showing, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí — in a fit of envy, and one of the few in the audience to grasp what Cornell had done — used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, as he stormed out, screaming: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if you had stolen it!” Another source has Dalí yelling: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!” Cornell, who was notoriously shy, was understandably distressed by this outlandish and inexcusable behavior, and stopped showing his films in public until the mid-sixties, when, with the encouragement of Jonas Mekas, he began showing them again.

If you have access to the Criterion Channel, you can see John Ashbery talk about movies in Michael Almereyda’s short film The Lonedale Operator . And anyone interested in Ashbery and the movies should seek out what he called the “muddled yet marvelous” Val Lewton production The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). Ashbery went so far as to write an essay about it. You can find it at archive.org. It’s so strange.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Thanks, Jim.