This remarkable animation imagines the beginnings of life on earth. It is a unique film example of “modernist primitivism” – in contrast to the Cubist painters (who were influenced by African art), Lye drew upon traditions of indigenous art from his own region of the world (New Zealand, Australia and Samoa). Lye was also influenced by doodling, which he described as a practice that “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.”

First screened at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in December 1936, Rose Hobart was reportedly received as unintelligible and inept, with the significant exception of Salvador Dalí. As legend has it, Dalí – in town for the Museum of Modern Art’s surrealist show—grew so enraged by the film that he kicked over the 16mm projector, which Cornell himself was operating; Dalí, the most envious of artists, had some idea of what Cornell had achieved.