With Lecture by Herbert Reynolds: "What Makes a Surrealist Film?" Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1937). "Cornell recut East of Borneo, starring Rose Hobart, to bring out the obsessive, the erotic, the marvelous images latent in the trashy jungle romance picture. Rose Hobart is elemental and beautiful, like the final eclipse of the sun beneath a woman's gaze" (James Brook). "Without the distraction of a mundane plot, viewers are treated to something akin to the haphazard moviegoing of the youthful Breton and Vach?but now within a single film, where new and surreal possibilities for meaning arise" (Herbert Reynolds). (20 mins, Sound-on-tape, Filter-tinted, 16mm, Print from Film-makers' Cooperative) La Perle (Georges Hugnet, Belgium, 1929). "In (La Perle) the Surrealist poet Georges Hugnet acts out an erotic adventure...Hugnet's scenario specifies that the film's images depend upon their simplicity, from an apparently accidental technique, in the style of newsreels or Mack Sennett...Hugnet and his director add tists which defy rational scrutiny, linking La Perle to the naive enigmas of early movie serials as well as to the ambiguities of contemporary Surrealist imagery...The most persistent of conundrums here is the man's uncertain motivation toward love in the company of vampirish beauties..." (Herbert Reynolds). Directed by Henri d'Ursel. Written by Hugnet. Photographed by Marc Bujard. With Kissa Kouprine, Hugnet, Mary Stutz, Ren? Savoy. (c. 35 mins, Silent, Piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb, B&W, 35mm, Print fom Museum of Modern Art) Plus: "The Yellow Octopus" (excerpt), the last chapter of Trail of the Octopus, which Breton cites in Najda as "This film, which has affected me far more than any other..." (1919, Silent, Piano accompaniment by Bruce Loeb, B&W, 35mm, Print from Library of Congress) Herbert Reynolds is a film historian and author of Through Surrealist Eyes: The Cinema and Surrealism in Its Formative Years, written for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition which he guest curated (1988). His assistance in formulating our current film exhibition has been invaluable.