rose is a rose is a rose
by Douglas Messerli
Ken Jacobs (director) Blonde
Cobra / 1963
Ken Jacobs’ 1963 film Blonde
Cobra began its life in the late 1950s as Bob
Flieshner attempted to make two “light monster movie comedies” shot
simultaneously with director/performer Jack Smith. Things were not preceding
well with either film, as Flieshner and Smith began to have a falling out over
who would pay after Jack’s cat knocked over a candle, creating a fire that
destroyed part of the raw stock. Smith claimed it was an act of God, and the
filming ceased. Jacobs himself describes what happened after:
“In the winter of ’59 Bob showed me
the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the
material not as the fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings
of a new entirety. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to
develop it as I saw fit. I think it was in late 1960 that Jack and I ignored
our personal animosities long enough to record his words and songs for the
sound track. The phrases he repeated into the tape recorder were mostly ones
I’d at some time heard him say; most were pet phrases he loved to recite, over
and over, his lessons. A very few I made up in his style. The procedure for
recording his monologues and songs: I played him selections from my 78
collection, music from the ’20’s and ’30’s, sometimes only the beginning of a
record and if he liked it would restart the record and immediately record. I
don’t think there was a second take of anything. Any lack of clarity is due to
the very second-rate equipment, third-rate, fourth-rate, we were using. I play
the harp for the Madame Nescience monologue. Jack supplied the Arabic music,
there’s also some SAFARI IN HIFI; a Villa-Lobos string quartet speeded up; a
haunting section of a children’s 45… “Baby Wants To Sleep”. A small amount of
my own previous shooting was cut into the film, the short `drowning in
nescience’ color sequence near the beginning. BLONDE COBRA is an erratic
narrative—no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for
convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of
imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed
with American 1950’s, 40’s, 30’s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured
and yet triumphing-on one level-over the situation with style, because he’s
unapologetically gifted, has a genius for courage, knows that a state of
indignity can serve to show his character in sharpest relief. He carries on,
states his presence for what it is. Does all he can to draw out our
condemnation, testing our love for its limits,….enticing us into an absurd
moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw-off’.”
Since the film, although restructured in Jacobs’ standard use of found
material, was also based on footage from a couple of films previous to Smith’s
notorious Flaming Creatures—which in its March screening at the New
Bowery Theater in the same year resulted in the police closing it down, seizure
of the film, and arrest of the
exhibitor, Jonas Mekas, the projectionist Jacobs, Jacobs partner and soon to be
wife, Florence Karpf, who sold tickets, and even the usher, Jerry Sims (who is
Smith’s co-star in Blonde Cobra, all charged with obscenity—Blonde
Cobra, which premiered the next month paired with Flaming Creatures
at the Bleecker Street Cinema, might also been seen as a documentary.
But then, the film that even its
admirers have described as “the worst film ever made”* and Mekas characterized
as a “Baudelarian cinema of poetry,” “at once beautiful and terrible, good and
evil, dirty and delicate,” is many different things to as many different
people. Other than the majority who have hated it, critics have acclaimed it as
a "fascinating audio-visual testament to the tragicomic performance of the
inimitable Jack Smith" (Marc Siegel), containing "languid
improvisations studded with the bare bones of narrative incident or, more
accurately, its collapse" (Paul Smith); and a brilliant choreographing of
“what is not seen, or the unseen scene, as an allegory of the difficulty of
making sexually provocative films in an era in which such representations were
legally prohibited” (Ara Osterweil).
Others have described the work, in
various ways, as a study in destruction, a failed representation of a failure of
representation, a film that openly reveals its own flaws in its pretense to
art. All agree, finally, that with the appearance Smith’s Flaming Creatures
and Jacob’s Blonde Cobra along with works that followed immediately
after by Gregory Markopoulos, Ron Rice, Charles Boultenhouse, Andy Warhol,
Kenneth Anger, Andy Milligan, and numerous others that the barrier to open
sexual expression, particularly LGBTQ sex, was finally torn away
forever.
Osterweil describes the situation quite nicely:
“Smith’s voice flutters around the
room like a moth suicidally navigating a chamber of searing lights.
Smith’s outrageous story is made all the more vivid by Jacobs’ ironical
decision to keep it of screen, or ‘obscene.’ Had the sacrilege described by
Smith actually been filmed, the courts would have almost certainly found Blonde
Cobra even more obscene than Smith’s own Flaming Creatures. Yet
without an image to ground Smith’s disembodied voice, audience members are
compelled to imagine the perverse spectacle for themselves. By refusing to
deliver the goods, Ken Jacobs thus makes the audience complicit in the
authorship of Smith’s transgressions. In doing so, he reminds us of how mass
media (like radio and cinema) require us to consent, physiologically and
mentally, to our participation. Of course, if we can be seduced by the ravings
of a lunatic, we will consent to just about anything—as long as it gives good
play.”
Yet despite these verbal interpolations, the long blackouts, the jumble
of scratchy images, there is also a kind of unifying body of images mostly of
Smith, dressed in outrageous gowns, absurdly applied lipstick, and dangling
earrings, while wearing various hats while he simply poses or lies upon a
divan, looking longingly at the camera mostly with the forlorn conviction
expressed by his statement, late in the 33-minute film, “Why shave when I can’t
think of a reason for living,” or his quotation of Greta Garbo’s comment: “Life
is a sad business.”
As much as we are entertained by the goofy interpretations of his
semi-narrative tales, we are truly drawn into the film by his sense of
purposelessness or, at least, his outrageous impersonation of someone so out of
place in the world that there is nothing to be done but wait for tragedy to
strike. 27 years later, of course, it did when Smith died of AIDS at age 57.
In a footnote only to their essay
“Finding Community in the Early 1960s” in Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett’s
study Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s the authors
suggest, “By 1960 the Cornell film [Rose Hobart] was recognized as a
masterpiece of the American avant-garde. Thus Blonde Cobra seems a camp
version of Rose Hobart.”
Having now watched Jacobs’ film several times, I’ve become convinced
that they’re right, that perhaps even without fully recognizing it, Jacobs has
strung together among his various voice-overs and dark sexual tales (one might
even argue that these are the camp representations of the unheard conversations
of the males that Rose Hobart is forced to suffer) the film is organized—if
such a word is even possible in the collapsed picture Blonde Cobra
reveals itself to be—as a continuation of Cornell’s film, a work that turns
Cornell’s refusal to admit to the subconscious into an actualization of it.
Jacob’s drama begins with the three major male actors of this version,
presumably Flieshner and Sims, standing on either side of Smith as he slides to
the floor in diminishment to be seen next as his female drag figure, Jacky
Smith. If Jacky is the equivalent of Rose Hobart in this film, constantly
appearing in new garb, looking off morosely into space, it is also important to
note that this Rose is always clearly in “drag,” essential in understanding the
ridiculousness of believing that costume, no matter carefully applied might
actually transform the male actor into the “real” woman of his desire, just as
creating a movie about a woman with whom one is obsessed is absurd. It is
always doomed to failure. And as Parker Tyler argues in Screening the Sexes:
Homosexuality in the Movies, before it became fashionable to profess one’s
homosexuality as Allen Ginsberg famously did, previously “among homosexuals the
masculine dress of everyday [was] an automatic and unavoidable ‘disguise,’”
just as was a man pretending to be a woman in drag.
Accordingly, Jacky/Jack often keeps alternating between female and male
throughout, in some scenes, reminding one of Rose’s sprawled-out naps, Smith
openly revealing his own hairy chest.
Early in the film we see Smith’s drag figure topped with Garbo’s
Ninotchka-like hat as she drinks coffee, eerily close to the several scenes in Rose
Hobart in which she is served cocktails by the Prince, in Cornell’s
version, the cocktail itself being featured in a separate frame.
If there are moments when Rose almost appears as a female in
unconvincing male attire, so does Smith’s Jacky appear often as a male not so
successfully playing the female role. Both seem lost and out of place, unsure
of where to turn.
While Rose hugs her newly-acquired monkey to her face, so does Jacky
keep her suddenly in-hand chicken close to her heart. And just as Rose ponders
the monkey and the moon in eclipse, so does Jacky weigh the meaning of her
chicken and a full moon.
Just as Rose is courted by a Prince, so
does Jacky have encounters with a man who appears to be some sort of colorful
and exotic, perhaps Turkish, Prince, with a fez instead of a turban atop his
head.
And finally, if Rose packs a pistol for any danger she may face, in a grand melodramatic gesture a man, looking a lot like Rose’s husband in Jacobs’ film takes a long knife from his pocket and stabs Jacky to death. Soon after, however, we see the knife drop from Smith’s rectum, he emphatically declaring that “Sex is a pain in the ass,” assuring us that the murder was indeed tied up with sex.
Surely, not all of these visual echoes are not merely accidental, but
chosen precisely for their referential power. Both works, moreover, made by
apparently heterosexual males working within, knowingly or unknowingly LGBTQ
contexts were “found” and edited to reveal realities that neither of them might
have originally intended to express. But in the 27 years between ‘36 and ‘63
what was thought to be ephemeral, inexpressible, perhaps even surreal had been
turned on its head to become such an obvious reality that he was ripe for being
satirized, even lovingly mocked within the LGBTQ world. Cornell’s obscure
obsession had been so completely assimilated by the sophisticated New York gay
cinema world that its exaggerated re-presentation became almost comic, like
watching an old movie of oneself as a child. Strangely, however, the
heterosexual world that could not comprehend Cornell’s work were even more
perplexed by Jacobs’ revelation. Both were failures because they did not and
would not speak the language of the dominant heteronormative society. Still,
that world feared it along with Smith’s newer work, which it had also misread,
the two of them meaning so much for the homosexual world meant absolutely
nothing to the straight.**
*Concerning such cult-like movies I
always find it fascinating to read the comments of those who do not know the
history or simply do not have the skill to understand what they viewing. And
the few that I’ve chosen to share seem truly honest statements of individuals
simply not in the know and accordingly resenting what is being shown. We can
only praise them for having made the effort, nonetheless, to watch. These
comments follow the YouTube showing of Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra.
Imagine going to the cinema in the
1960s and paying to watch THIS
__
u know it's good art when it makes u
question why tf it even exists
__
This whole time I thought that was
Kermit the Frog narrating
__
It feels like a documentary about a
mental hospital
__
Can someone pkkease. Explain?
__
Remember the sixties? When you
didn't need talent to be an influential artist, you just had to be the first to
do something. This movie is really only proof that boomers didn't start to suck
in old age; they were crap back then, too
__
Well, I lasted 6 minutes. Sorry, not
even good as home movies go.
__
If you make a movie that is
accessible to a larger audience that has risque content, then you're a pioneer.
But if you make a poorly shot home movie, while high on speed, that's just a
bunch of shots of a guy you're trying to screw, that you'll probably use to
pleasure yourself later, you're not reinventing the wheel. And to release it to
the public? Why??
**In response to my review, film
commentator, performer, and writer Daryl Chin wrote me, supporting many of my
suspicions about this film. Below I have reprinted, with his permission, his
commentary in full:
Quite brilliant analysis! Have to
say that ROSE HOBART remains one of my favorite films, ever since i saw it in
January of 1970 (Jonas Mekas screened it for me one afternoon while i was
helping out at the soon-to-be-opened Anthology Film Archives). So here is a
story (told to me by Ken Jacobs). In 1954, Stan Brakhage was in NYC, where he
was doing some work for Joseph Cornell (he was one of the artists who would
"work" as Cornell's assistant, which included going out - on
Cornell's instruction - with a 16mm movie camera to shoot a film; one that was
shot by Brakhage was THE WONDER RING, a movie shot from a subway ride through
Queens when the subway goes above ground; Brakhage would reuse that footage and
title it GNIR REDNOW; the reason "work" is in quotes is that Cornell
often really couldn't afford to pay people, but they worked while they could
before having to move on to some paying job (other artists who did this
included Larry Jordan and, of course, Ken Jacobs). So Brakhage moves on, and
Ken takes his place. And Ken is trying to label the films that Cornell has
made, including the various "collage" films (films Cornell has made
from footage from the 16mm films in his collection). So Ken comes across ROSE
HOBART, and Cornell gives him a "screening" meaning they play it on
Cornell's 16mm projector with the different filters (to "tint" the
film) and with the music (from different tracks from that album). A
"mind-blowing" experience! This is in 1958 or so. Ken asks if he
could borrow ROSE HOBART, because he is so excited! Cornell agrees. So Ken then
takes ROSE HOBART home, and he screens it for his friends Jack Smith, Bob
Fleischner, and Jerry Jofen. As Ken said, they go NUTS! They screen it
backwards and forwards, they get a series of gels and make it red, blue,
purple, yellow, green, orange, they use the music Cornell used, but then they
add their own music! Like Dali, their feeling is that they have seen the movie
that they have always dreamed about! So the connection between ROSE HOBART and
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS is not coincidental, but absolutely deliberate.
(NORMAL LOVE, for example, can be seen as Jack Smith's attempt to do his own
version of ROSE HOBART, and the way he would screen it, with the long breaks
between screening the snippets of film while he changed records to
create/enhance/define "the mood", was his way of recreating the
original "conditions" under which he watched ROSE HOBART).
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).
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