The Sunday Intertitle: The Upside-Down

BY NIGHT WITH TORCH AND SPEAR is a somewhat mysterious experimental short by Joseph Cornell. More mysterious than the others — it was found in his effects after his death, and by the nature of these found footage assembly works, we can’t even be sure that it’s even a film. I mean, we’re fort of sure. But without a statement by JC himself, it could conceivably he just a bunch of footage he’d spliced together to look at later and maybe make a film out of.

(It’s definitely a film. But perhaps one that Cornell had put aside, unfinished.)

The above intertitles appear only as flash frames, but the following one, from which the film has acquired its name, is held for a good long time:

I mean, we have to call the film something, assuming it’s a film, and this is at least a bunch of text that’s in the film, albeit closer to the end than the beginning. But there is zero evidence that JC ever referred to the film by this title.

It’s a very atmospheric piece (or pieces). An assemblage of microscopy, industrial practices and unspecified tribal activity. The upside-down footage reminded me of Oshima’s long upside-down car journey in THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM. It’s also moving backwards. (One way to get film to play backwards, if it’s double-sprocketed, it to simply invert the film strip. If you were planning to use reverse action, you might deliberately shoot stuff upside-down.) It’s curiously fascinating, a very basic form of “making strange,” where every action and object becomes newly intriguing and acquires a mystic quality.

Clouds of sparks implode downwards into molten pools which drain into darkness.

Every experimental filmmaker needs to hold back a trunk item like this which is unrecorded and unexplained and which might simply be a OBJECT and not a film. It will gain hugely in resonance by lack of provenance or known intent.