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." It was perhaps his use of the term "mirrored version" which led to the confusion. However, Brakhage also noted that Cornell had considered the film unfinished; that Cornell had sent it to him, several years before his death, with several strips of film loose in the can, requesting that Brakhage finish it. Brakhage wrote, "As I was never able to improve upon his 'unfinished' edit of it, this print is exactly as he sent it to me then. The five or six seconds he couldn't find any place for have, accordingly, been left out."
1955-196?, 16mm, color/silent, 6 min. $20 Rental
16mm print sale: $350
"This film comes to exist because Joseph Cornell wished, one fine summer day, to show me the old homes of his beloved Flushing. One of them had been torn down and another beside it was scheduled for demolition. In torment (similar to that which had prompted him to ask me to photograph the Third Ave. Elevated before it was destroyed) he suggested we spend the afternoon preserving 'the world of this house,' its environs. It would be too strong a word to say he 'directed' my photography; and yet his presence and constant suggestions (often simply by a lift of the hand, or lifted eyebrows even) made this film entirely his. He then spent years editing it, incorporating 're-takes' into the film's natural progress, savoring and lovingly using almost every bit of the footage. And then he gave it to me, 'in memory of that afternoon.' It was originally to be called Tower House, then Bolts of Melody (in homage to Emily Dickinson) and then Portrait of June and very often simply June." - Stan Brakhage
1955-196?, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $30 Rental
16mm print sale: $450