Although it was all but overshadowed by the more ambitious and better organized Tampa International Film Festival, which took place right around the same time, the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image had its moments. And of those moments, none was so memorable as that magical evening when film archivist and pop culture commentator Bruce Posner showed up to treat the crowd to some of the rarest and most sublime films ever seen around these parts. The late Joseph Cornell was an artist whose dabbling in the medium of cinema largely comes down to one short film — the legendary Rose Hobart. But Posner managed to unearth reels of equally astonishing stuff that Cornell was tinkering with right up to the time of his death. These abstract film fragments — still so little known that the individual works don't even have names — were as beautiful as they were mysterious. Just locating the out-of-the-way Ybor HCC classroom where the screening took place was an ordeal, but each one of the handful of folks who actually managed to be there that evening is still counting their lucky stars.
Ybor Festival of the Moving Image, 813-253-7674, 813-935-9232 or www.yborfilmfestival.com.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2003.