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).

Joseph Cornell | Rose Hobart / 1936

standing by while waiting to escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Cornell (director) Rose Hobart / 1936

 

    Cornell, as has been reported numerous times, lived a life separate from most fellow artists—although he did keep in touch with several important artists throughout his life and cannot truly be characterized as an “outsider” artist, particularly since he knew well the works of Max Ernst, René Magritte, Kurt Schwitters and others—residing on Utopia Boulevard in Flushing, Queens, where he cared for his mother and his brother Robert who, having cerebral palsy. was paralyzed. Cornell remained in basic isolation until his death in 1972.

      He is best known, of course, for his personal miniature boxes, collaged with materials from magazines and records, photographs, toys, and souvenir ephemera, which were stored in a disconnected refrigerator. In 1929 he also began to work on paper collages, displaying them in a show at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. He also became fascinated with dance and film, seeing as much dance as possible and simply imagining it when it became too emotionally difficult to attend performances; he also collected novelty films, comedies, and works of several early directors including the works by D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, Louis Feuillade, and others. He also found and purchased an old print of George Melford’s East of Borneo, falling in love with the film’s actor Rose Hobart.

      Although most of Cornell’s love objects were women—and he developed a deep, even what has been described as “passionate” relationship with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama when she lived in New York City in the 1960s, which continued even when she returned to Japan with an extensive correspondence between the two—his loves where not of the physical kind. Indeed, I think we have to perceive the numerous shrines to male poets, the many female ballet dancers present and past, and his obsession with Rose Hobart as being something close to the kind of intense wall-postings of both male and female adolescents that represent a kind of fan-based obsession,  particularly related to the numerous gay male cacoëthes of divas and icons such as Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, and so many others as expressed in camp theater and film by such gay individuals as Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, Charles Ludlam, Andy Warhol, and John Waters.

       This is particularly so, I would argue, with Cornell’s 1936 film Rose Hobart, collaged from the film he had found of East of Borneo. Winnowing down the original 1931 film from its 76 minutes to only 19, Cornell, to quote critic Daniel Eagan:

 

“...Reduced the plot of East of Borneo to a series of erotic situations and gazes, turning an improbable jungle melodrama into a story of thwarted desire. Time and space no longer mattered, or made sense; characters remained ciphers; and the ‘story’ became whatever viewers thought about the people and settings they were seeing on screen.”  

     Tinted in blue in the first version, later in rose after the heroine’s name (I find the rose version far superior, but the blue color does further associate her more clearly with the standard image of the “blue boy,” the European notion of the sad gay young man) the actor of this film is seen mostly staring into a world that appears unbelievable to her, filled as it is by palm trees, strange moonlit nights (some of the film’s images were stolen from another film about a lunar eclipse), wild animals, and a volcano ready to explode at any moment. 

     She is often observed speaking to or having to listen to males (her husband and the Prince), but there is no romance and she appears removed from their attentions which often seem to take the appearance of arguments. Mostly she is locked away in a kind of palace world, frozen out of experience—reiterated by the several times she pulls on an overcoat during the jungle nights—as she appears to ponder what is happening around her and mostly wait, and wait, and wait perhaps for one of the males to make his move, for the volcano to erupt, and even a jaguar to attack.

    Even the monkey she obtains from a passing native, attends to her only while she holds it close. When she sits the monkey down to better pet it, it appears to fall asleep, she quietly removing the chain around its neck, apparently to let it run off free from any further embrace. 

      Throughout, even in the company of men, she seems alone and impenetrable, an outsider trapped in a world that has little to do with her. When in her room she takes up her purse, she seems not even to know what to put into it, or where any object she might desire to put into it is kept. Opening several bureau drawers, she finds a few handkerchiefs and in yet another drawer a gun, determining that it may not be a bad thing to carry with her, although she never has the opportunity in Cornell’s film to use it.

    The men battle others, order servants about, serve up grand tables of food, but Rose Hobart, set against an even more alien musical score by Nesto Amaral and his Orchestra from Holiday in Brazil, appears never to have the opportunity to involve herself in any of it, her role apparently being only to stand, discretely drink the cocktails set in front of her, and listen. We recognize that what she is truly seeking is a way to escape from the world in which she has become imprisoned. Something will happen, it seems, if she only waits long enough. Something will break through the world keeping her from human contact. It is a role well known to almost any gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender being who can’t find another such as themselves in the world into which they are born or suddenly discover themselves. In her difference Rose Hobart stands terrifying alone, despite her fragile beauty.

     Feeling the way they do, such figures often take on far greater significance for others than their mere humanity. They become beings against which others stand (as we see in her scenes with her husband), objects of desire (as for the Prince), or figures simply to ignore as if they do not exist (as all the others who inhabit this strange world treat her); and as such, outsiders like Rose appear bigger than life, the very source of camp expression that those who attempt to embrace or re-present them imitate. In their pain and isolation they are also fools, something to be made fun of, silly beings of no use in the environment in which they are trapped, yet obviously another aspect of their allure and adoration. The foolish outsider is what nearly every gay man has felt himself to be since he has first become aware of his environment.

      Cornell does not fully explore these issues. He is fascinated simply with the erotic displacement, the sense of being positioned next to nearly unrecognizable objects and figures that Rose hints of in her forlorn moments, the very expression that is at the heart of all Cornell icons.

      However, because the artist does not fully explore his own subconscious desires, but simply openly expresses them, there is also in his boxed-up shrines and in this film as well what James Fenton has described as something that even his most devoted admirers “must sometimes turn away from a certain shadow box wishing they had not seen in it, or experience acute anxiety in seeing one of his short films.” Audrey Hepburn, Fenton remarks, returned the box Cornell made for her. And in that sense Cornell remains a sort of unschooled innocent, without the full ability to comprehend where precisely his surrealist-like collages have taken him. A little bit like Henry Darger, Cornell, metaphorically speaking, does not seem to realize that his lovely Rose does not have a penis.

      Evidently, when he first showed Rose Hobart to an audience at the Julien Levy Gallery, fellow artist Salvador Dali intentionally kicked over the projector, complaining, in Eagan’s version of the story, “It isn’t that I could say Cornell stole my idea. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had.” Dali, unlike most of the rest of the audience, recognized the significance of what he had just seen.

      So startled was Cornell by Dali’s reaction that he stopped showing his films. Although Donald Windham wrote in The New York Times in 1980 that he did continue to show them to friends like Gypsy Rose Lee and Montgomery Clift, two gay friendly individuals obviously.

      Accordingly, even though we cannot directly argue that Cornell’s Rose Hobart is a LGBTQ-friendly movie, subconsciously it speaks the same language. It tells of gay desire without literally demonstrating it, the desire here simply being to “come out” by escaping like the monkey on the chain. 

     And fortunately, I am not the only one who noticed the affinity of Cornell’s obsession with the actor Rose Hobart with gay camp. In the early 1960s, Cornell’s films, particularly this one, began once more to be available for viewing, particularly under the request of Jonas Mekas. When in 1969 a print was made from the original, Cornell determined, once again, to tint it rose.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Douglas Messerli | East of Eden [Introduction] / 2022

east of eden

                        “If money is the root of all evil, I’ll take the whole tree.”

by Douglas Messerli

 

American actress Rose Hobart (1906-2000) was born on May Day, the daughter of a cellist of the New York Symphony Orchestra, Paul Hobart, and his wife, opera singer Marguerite Kefer. Her parents divorced when she was seven years old, and soon after she and her sister Polly were sent to France to live with their grandmother, returning home with at the beginning of World War I, when they attended boarding schools.

      At age 15 (she telling authorities she was 18) Hobart was cast in the stage play Liliom by Ferenc Molnár (the work that would later be adapted into the musical Carousel) which debuted in New York on in September 1923. Two years later she played the role of Charmian in George Bernard Shaw’s Ceasar and Cleopatra, and became one of the original members of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, making her London debut in 1928, and later touring with Noël Coward in The Vortex and performing opposite of Helen Hayes in What Every Woman Knows.

      In 1930 she was asked to play Julie in the film version of Liliom, and would play in over 40 motion pictures in a period 20 years, including in some highly memorable works including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Scandal for Sale (1932), Susan and God (1940), and Ziegfeld Girl (1941).

      Certainly not among her best movies, but in a role that made her memorable for reasons I describe below, she played the role of Linda Randolph in East of Borneo (1931), a woman who seeks for her husband on the island of Marado, just east of Borneo. She travels there, despite the fact that she is told that Marado’s jungles are far too dangerous for a white woman, suffering dangerous rafting rides and encounters with crocodiles. Eventually she discovers that her husband is now the personal physician to the island’s “enigmatic prince,” who soon also lusts after Linda, creating a dangerous love triangle. The film was directed by George Melford—whose most notable production was Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik—with a screenplay by Edwin H. Knopf (brother to publisher Alfred A. Knopf and who later became a noted producer) and Dale van Every (who wrote the screenplays to Marianne and Captains Courageous).

       In 1949 the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hobart, due to her commitment to improving working conditions for actors early in her career, which she later described in her autobiography in these terms: “On my first three pictures, they worked me 18 hours a day and then complained because I was losing so much weight that I had to put stuff in my evening dress.... When I did East of Borneo (1931), that schlocky horror film...we shot all night long. They started at o’clock at night and finished at 5 in the morning. For two solid weeks, I was working with alligators, jaguars, and pythons out on the back lot. I thought, ‘This is acting?’ It was ridiculous. We were militant about the working conditions. We wanted an eight-hour day like everybody else.”

     Hobart had also served on the board of the Screen Actors Guild and was an active participant in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, a group which anti-Communists like Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed was subversive. Lee J. Cobb named her as a Communist.

    Although Hobart claimed she was never a member of the Communist Party, she refused to cooperate, instead reading a prepared statement that concluded, "In a democracy no one should be forced or intimidated into a declaration of his principles. If one does yield to such pressure, he gives away his birthright. I am just mulish enough not to budge when anyone uses force on me." In 1950, Hobart was also listed in the anti-Communist blacklisting publication, Red Channels. Hobart never worked in film again, although she continued to perform on stage and in the 1960s played in several television roles.

    Perhaps none of this has a direct bearing on the fact that reclusive artist Joseph Cornell had years earlier become obsessed with the actor.

    In this short collation of two films, I bring together my discussion of Joseph Cornell’s strange and loving tribute to Hobart and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacob’s loving satire of that work.

    Neither of these films is openly gay, but both can be said to represent audacious examples of camp adoration—Cornell of Rose Hobart and Ken Jacobs of Joseph Cornell—that represents a truly gay sensibility, even if neither director is homosexual. Perhaps we have simply to perceive these works as examples of how the gay exaggeration of love and its expression—born, perhaps, from the realization in the gay world of just how difficult it was to openly express love coupled with a self-conscious cynicism that had evolved from that attempt to demonstrate and maintain it—highly influenced even the perceptibly straight world.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Leanne Hanley | Sapphire / 2021

the addictions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Hains (screenplay), Leanne Hanley (director) Sapphire / 2021 [14 minutes]

 

In this rather superficial, apparently autobiographical tale, a trans man Ethan, addicted to love and drugs, creates an alter ego named Sapphire (Andreja Pejic) who struts across the set in lovely colored wigs playing out various tropes of film musicals, romances, and trippy drug scenes.

  She falls in love with Max (Lachlan Woods) who desperately loves her, the two quickly becoming a couple. While they make intense love, cocaine and heroin soon take over, and even Max who attempts to control her intake finds it impossible to help.

    We see the story played out primarily through the memories of Ethan/Sapphire, but at moments we get what appears to be the viewpoint of Max, who proclaims “At first she helped me escape my misery, but then she became my misery,” which, obviously, might also be the observation of Ethan/Sapphire as well.

     Within the depths of her suffering, Sapphire locks herself away in the bathroom, shoots up, and nearly dies before being finally sent away to an institution for help.

     The film is basically beautiful to watch, but an empty story with regard to such a serious drug addiction; certainly, it offers no deep insights about how the addictions developed or how they might be contained, although it does appear that by film’s end Sapphire has found peace with her Ethan half and, obviously, is able to talk somewhat objectively about her problem.

     The writer of this work, Australian actor Harry Hains, died in Los Angeles one year before the release of this film at the age of 27 of fentanyl intoxication. In photographs of him I’ve seen, he looks a great deal like the figure telling Sapphire’s story after the fact. And the final film was produced by his mother, Jane Bader, who plays a saintly nurse in the movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).