Jean Grémillon | Gueule d’Amour (Lady Killer) / 1937

a love the lover cannot explain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Spaak (screenplay, based on the novel by André Beucler), Jean Grémillon (director) Gueule d’Amour (Lady Killer) / 1937

 

French director Jean Grémillon is perceived in his home country as one of the most respected of the pre-New Wave directors alongside with greats such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Jacques Becker. His important films during the war years such as Remorques (1941), Lumière d'été (1943), and Le ciel est à vous (1944)—brooding yet spiritually luminous works—were highly popular with the film-going audiences of their day, following in the success of his earlier works Gueule d’Amour (1937) and L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1938). His three great works of the war years has recently been collected in a Criterion Eclipse disk, receiving significant attention when released. Yet today Grémillon still remains unknown to US audiences, particularly when compared to Renoir and Carné.

     Renoir’s esteemed position given the extraordinarily high quality of his oeuvre speaks for itself. And Carné’s works remain international favorites, mine as well. Yet, particularly when viewed in the context of the latter, Grémillon’s movies can now be seen to be in touch with contemporary filmmaking, and at times in the impulsive actions of their characters and the radical camera shifts in which, at moments, the narrative, played out in images of light and dark or simply revealed sans actors, have far more in common with films of the New Wave and in their sometimes obsessional and tortuous relationships between male and female, spiced with wit, almost remind one at times of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou or François Truffaut Jules et Jim.

      The ironies of those New Wave films, if nothing else, are played out quite beautifully in Grémillon’s Gueule d’Amour, best translated as Lady Killer—where the doe-eyed soft-spoken Jean Gabin as Lucien Bourrache, a popular star in his day who could match Jean-Paul Belmondo in sex appeal in the 1960s—plays a dashing soldier of the Don Juan mold, said like Casanova to have a lady waiting for him in every city and village.

     We certainly witness that in the city of Orange when the military force marches through the streets, the women racing to their windows and balconies simply to catch a glimpse of the “lady killer” who all hope to catch his eye. He can hardly visit a café or restaurant without every woman ogling him.

     The “Gueule d'Amour” is even reprimanded, with secret admiration, by his superiors who have received complaints from males who have temporarily lost their lovers and wives as he sweeps through their towns. Yet, our hero denies that he has any interest in the woman whatsoever.

     As he tells his innocent friend René (René Lefèvre)—who a little like a young puppy throughout the film gently touches, almost in fond admiration, the older and experienced man—he is more interested in the camaraderie of soldiers than the women he encounters along his way.

     We might almost believe that, but he too is enchanted with his own reputation, keeping a photo of himself in full regalia in his barracks. Moreover, although he is soon to leave his service, he finds numerous ways to sneak off on tours to nearby cities wherein he continues to embellish his reputation as a woman slayer.

     Having received a small inheritance of 10,000 francs from his aunt, he is permitted to travel overnight to speak to a lawyer in Cannes, but once there finds himself, soon after, trying to write a telegram to his commander to explain that he has missed his train—and probably will continue miss his trains throughout the day.

     It is at the telegram office that he encounters the beautiful, disdainful, and rather mysterious Madeleine (Mireille Balin) who, somewhat like Proust’s small lemon and orange-flavored cake, sends him reeling through his memories of past and present loves; if he has been unfilled previously in his affairs with women, he is completely obsessed with Madeleine.

         She has come to the telegraph office to request more money, having lost everything she had gambling at the casino, and as he attempts to wine and dine her in the adjoining hotel, she—oblivious to or haughtily dismissive of the stares of the dining room’s females—cautiously accepts his offer of his new-found money to take another chance at roulette.

     She loses once again. Distressed, she asks that they leave for a leisurely walk before taking a taxi to her home where, without even so much as a goodnight kiss, she locks him out.

     So begins a painful series of events which result in Lucien, now discharged from the military, following her to Paris. Finding work as a printer, he runs into her again at the opera and follows her to her villa, attempting to reconnect.

      This time she is somewhat more receptive, and they find moments to share sex, while Madeleine still keeps him at a distance, planning dinners which she suddenly cancels, and making plans for the cinema or simply a walk for which she fails to show up.

      What quickly becomes clear is that she is a kept woman, whose butler and mother help her to keep Lucien at bay. A bit like Bates, Edward Everett Horton’s fastidiously correct butler in the Fred Astaire musical Top Hat of just two years before Gueule d'Amour, a good deal of the picture’s humor derives from le valet de chambre’s (Jean Aymé, best known for his role in Louis Feuillade’s 1915 Les Vampires), aloof put-downs of the would-be lover as he attempts to keep him as far away as possible from entering Madeleine’s domain uninvited.

      When finally Lucien, against all decorum, barges in, he is met with Madeleine’s mother, who while comically chowing down an entire gourmet meal cooked up just for her by the valet, makes it quite clear to Gabin’s character that, while her daughter’s wealthy benefactor may permit some sexual dalliances, they can be only occasional and temporary; Madeleine by no means can go with him on vacation in the country as he desires. Lucien retreats, now realizing the full truth of Madeleine’s sexual commitments.

     Still obsessed with her, however, he is determined, after what he has imagined to be a shared love, to get an answer from her directly. This time the mother calls the patron, who soon after appears to claim his financial prize. Standing on either side of the fat financier, Madeleine and her mother make it clear that Lucien, no longer the handsome “lady killer” of his military days, has no real role to play in their lives.

      Quitting his job and Paris, the former soldier returns to Orange where he opens up a small country bar, without making an attempt to contact his former friend, René, who has since leaving the military become a respected doctor in the city.

       Through a visit to a former restaurant he and Lucien once frequented, René discovers that his friend has returned, joyfully meeting up with him and describing that he now has himself discovered love in the form of an impulsive woman who has changed his entire life. He invites his dearest friend to meet his fiancée, Madeleine, the very next evening.

       Yes, Lucien suddenly perceives, it is his former Madeleine with whom René has fallen in love. He arrives at René’s home early, before Madeleine. The scene that follows is almost an inverted idyll played out with the two males, as René takes the now decimated “lady killer” around the small villa he has been reconstructing, describing to his friend the different flowers and gardens he has planted, his dreams for new additions to the house, and his future dreams. He has indeed created the perfect world in which to live with someone he deeply loves. Alas, we know what these two heterosexual males cannot: that together they would both come to life and love in such an ideal space. René, as Lucien had so often before, receives a telegram saying that his lover cannot join him.

      When Lucien arrives home to his bar, Madeleine is waiting there, the camera capturing her silhouette, while her now aged and ailing former lover is represented only through his shadow. When the two meet, it is as if they have performed the scene over and over before and know the lines well before they say them, she insisting that she has come to Orange only because of her love for him and that she wants to resume their relationship; he reprimanding her for having so taken advantage of the childlike believer René.

     Insisting he is simply jealous of her meaningless attentions to René, she phones René telling him that he has never meant anything to her and that their relationship has come to an end.

     So too, however, has Lucien’s love for her; but his statement of that fact only results in her further taunts, suggesting that she will use René as a pawn to get her long-ago lover back, torturing the innocent man in the process with her pretended love.

     The Don Juan now becomes the murderer he was always meant to be, exorcising her not for himself so much as to protect his friend—a man with whom he cannot even explain to himself that he loves in a way he could never have this plotting femme fatale.

    Showing up at René’s door Lucien has no rational explanation of what has just happened, putting himself entirely in his friend’s hands—which only reminds us how earlier in this film René had so innocently yet lovingly stroked Lucien’s knee and face.

     His friend, it appears, now perfectly understands what truly has happened, buying Lucien a ticket for Marseille and from there an escape to Africa where he will be safe. At the train station—while Lucien Bourrache (which means “borage,” the blue herbaceous plant which symbolizes power and courage) stares forward awaiting a destiny he cannot comprehend and perhaps having lost any memories through Madeleine’s murder he may have had of the past—René kisses Lucien gently on the cheek, not in the way another Frenchman might greet another friend or to say goodbye, but with a shy intensity we comprehend means something far deeper.

     As the train moves away with Lucien on it, René, like the hundreds of lovers saying goodbye, runs after it until it has sped away from his fruitless attempt to call his lover back.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).       

 

 

 

Sergei Eisenstein | Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

a living picture book of boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaak Babel, Sergei Eisenstein, and Aleksandr Rzheshevsky (screenplay, based on a story by Ivan Turgenev), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

 

The film finally awarded Eisenstein after his return from Mexico and the long five-year ostracization, as we have already discussed in my essay on Battleship Potemkin was Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow).

     In this instance we have only fragments of the film, yet here too we can easily perceive that despite the film’s story, central to those who hired Eisenstein, the director himself focused time and again upon the young boys’ beauty in opposition to their fathers and the other elders who would destroy their own youth in revenge for familial betrayal. Just a few clips make it clear how Eisenstein’s camera was focused, quite brilliantly, upon homoerotic images of the young boys he hired from the peasant farmers on location, something so obvious here that I recognized it even before reading Nestor Almendros’ revelatory 1991 essay, particularly since the political tale is so diluted within the fragments available.

    In the first frames of the film Eisenstein already sets up the opposition between the old order—the kulaks (the prosperous landed peasants under Czarist rule) and the church priest who, as one of the “young pioneers” puts it, would all like to return to the past of the Czars—and the Soviet newborns by outlining the deathly battle between the 11-year old Stepok (Vitya Kartashov) and his brutal and psychotic father (Boris Zakhaya) who before the film has begun beaten the boy’s mother to death because, Stepok explains, “she understood me.” In short, if his father belongs to the old order, out to destroy the new, Stepok begins the movie as an outsider, something akin in Eisenstein’s more mythological rather than party-line version of what today we might describe as a queer individual in the sense that he has broken away from the traditional, familial society. Surely that is not the message the Communist youth group and leaders intended, but it was clearly etched out in Eisenstein’s intent. The following pictures beautifully represent the opposition that is sustained throughout the film, even if the “young pioneers” soon after take over the church, oust the kulaks, and take control of the fields and horses.

    At first, the boys are also presented as figures who are kept out: out of the bar, the church, and the society of elders; but gradually as they come to take on greater and greater communal responsibilities they become accepted, welcomed into the larger farm-sharing society in which they exist. Yet the images of the early part of the film truly reveal their “outsiderness,” which is some respects is continued throughout the film simply because Eisenstein determines to place them in scenes in which they function and depend primarily upon one another.

     Before and even during the major events of the film—the community takeover of the church, the communal struggle to put out the fire set by the kulak saboteurs of the corn depot, the kulaks’ arrestment, the boys’ night with horses, and the final struggle with the escaped saboteurs during which Steptok’s father kills his son—the director almost turns his film into the huge picture book akin the 232-page work by Georges and Ronald C. Nelson found among Michael Jackson’s Neverland book collection in the 1993 police raid for suspected pedophilia, The Boy: A Photographic Essay.

      As I mentioned, Eisenstein also presents pictures of young peasant girls, mostly of the plump side, and even creates a scene depicting a heterosexual teenage romance; but for the most part, the stills we have left, other than beautiful nature scenes, are lovely photographs of young boys and men got up in various garb, some from vestments found in the church when they attempt to turn it into a club and others suggesting the wild pelts they wear, not unlike Mickey Rooney’s costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during their night with the horses. To prove my point I have selected more than a dozen examples, sprinkled throughout this essay.

   We know for certain that by this time we have entered the cinematic world of someone like the later François Reichenbach of the 1950s.

     If commentators now wonder how Eisenstein escaped the censorship of the Soviet leaders for his Battleship Potemkin, we can be rather assured that particularly after his Mexican activities, they did not miss the fact the director had turned the tale of a pioneer youth hero into a study of the faces and sometimes full bodies of beautiful boys. And surely much of the mysterious shutdown of the filming of Bezhin Meadow and the director’s recanting had to do with the obvious homosexual, almost pedophilic film he was attempting to make. I think one can safely argue that they censored this film because of its homosexual content, even if they could not ever admit that was the reason and Stalin would, nonetheless, later embrace Eisenstein’s propagandistic Alexander Nevsky.

    In short, Eisenstein probably was censored for his homosexuality. But lest we immediately shed tears over that fact, it is probably useful to remember that the director also survived through his own cowardice, his refusal to admit that he was gay and his willingness to continue as a Soviet propogandist. As the critic Almendros argues,

 

“To me, the more questionable of Eisenstein’s submissions were not the humiliations he endured while pursuing subjects that censorship would (and, in many cases, ultimately would not) permit. It is more disturbing that he implicitly tolerated the worse fates of others: the banishment of his beloved teacher—“my second father,” he used to call him—the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died in Gulag in Siberia; the murder by the NKVD of his close friend and collaborator from early theatrical days, Sergei Tretyakov; the dispatching of his onetime screenwriter Isaac Babel, and about half of Eisenstein’s students at the Moscow School, to the Gulag, where many perished....”

 

     Accordingly, we can strongly protest the director’s behavior and even accuse him, as younger Soviets have, of lying to later generations; but we cannot simply dismiss his remarkable images and filmmaking, much of which was generated through Eisenstein’s closeted and not so closeted homosexuality.

      Herbert Marshall, Eisenstein’s English ex-disciple at the Moscow Film School, compared his mentor to a Russian Matryoshka doll, the doll that within contains various other dolls of diminishing sizes: “Outside [Eisenstein] was a Soviet Russian[;] inside, according to some, he was a Christian, to others he was a Jew, to yet others a homosexual….”

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

 

 

Ken Jacobs | Blonde Cobra / 1963

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.

       Moreover, the film reveals, as Jacobs claims, no true narrative, toggles between several different stories Smith tells in multiple “cackling voices,” one concerning what Osterweil describes as “his impersonation of a gaggle of hysterical nuns as well as their Mother Superior ‘Madame Nescience,’..... They engage in a grotesque sexual orgy involving torn habits and defile a statue of Jesus.” In another of his fascinating monologues, Smith recounts the story of a small boy locked away in a mansion of 10 rooms all day as his mother leaves him alone, he crying out for her return. She returns to kiss him, but soon leaves again. Wandering through mansion he one day discovers a 7-year old boy living on the floor above him. At one point he describes setting the strange boy’s penis on fire. At still other moments Smith tells fragmentary and half-heard tales about necrophilia, and uses the word “cunt” several times. All of these evidences of child sexuality, abuse, lesbianism, S&M behavior, sexual engagement with religious objects, and mention of sex with the dead were banned as subjects one might bring to cinema.

      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

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u know it's good art when it makes u question why tf it even exists

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This whole time I thought that was Kermit the Frog narrating

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It feels like a documentary about a mental hospital

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Can someone pkkease. Explain?

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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

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Well, I lasted 6 minutes. Sorry, not even good as home movies go.

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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).

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).