mthing

surrealism:

Gnir Rednow by Joseph Cornell, 1960. 16mm, color, silent film. 00:05:22.

From ubuweb

After Joseph Cornell asked Stan Brakhage to film Manhattan’s Third Avenue Elevated Train, Brakhage photographed and edited his film The Wonder Ring. Not satisfied with the results, Cornell then took the outtakes from The Wonder Ring (Brakhage keeping his original intact), and edited his own version, with those outtakes, calling it “Gnir Rednow.” There has been a long-standing misconception that the film Gnir Rednow is simply The Wonder Ring 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. Rather, the pieces of film used for Gnir Rednow are those unused portions of the shots that had been incorporated into The Wonder Ring. Brakhage referred to Gnir Rednow as “Cornell’s mirrored version of The Wonder Ring,” stating that Cornell had made it to be “projectionable four ways: head-to-tail, tail-to-head (projector always running forward), and the film-flipped versions of the above two.”