56: Blonde Cobra

            There is a telling moment in Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra (1963) in which the film’s star, Jack Smith, declares as he pauses mid-rant, “I don’t know if this makes sense to you.”  Let me assure you that if you have not seen Blonde Cobra, or any of Smith’s own films such as Flaming Creatures (also 1963), that he makes no sense at all.  I was tempted to begin this review by writing that “it’s difficult to describe Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra,” but it is not.  In fact, several adjectives spring quickly to mind, among them: disturbing, offensive, and pointless.

            The film is comprised of three primary vignettes, in which Smith and friend Bob Fleischner play dress-up and prance for the camera in front of a mirror while Smith describes acts of perversion in voiceover.  In the first sequence Smith cross-dresses as a Gypsy fortune teller with an oral fixation on raw poultry as his narration describes necrophilia and childhood sexual molestation.  As a visual separation between scenes, extended rolls of blank leader fill the screen, and Smith tells a story of an elderly nun who is lashed with a rosary for confessing desires of lesbianism to her Mother Superior.  This all gives way to another tale of women using religious statues as objects of masturbation, and then meeting the same punishment as the nun.  Smith’s commentary on his narrative is equally off-putting, as he laughingly remarks, “God’s not dead…He’s just marvelously sick.”

            As the visual changes back to the game of dress-up, Smith and Fleischner emerge as Warner Bros-esque gangsters, burning holes in one another’s ties with their cigarettes and dancing to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers’ chorus of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”  Were it not for this sequence, edited together by Jacobs after Smith and Fleischner shot the footage, I believe the film would be utterly forgettable with regard to influence. However, it is notable that Blonde Cobra precedes the somewhat similar use of music for staging in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), by a year.

            Another curtain of blank leader gives way to a third sequence of the two performers, now dressed as jungle explorers, while they continue to perversely abuse the various objects within the crowded apartment set.  One particular shot, of a golf club wedged in the crease of one of the men’s backsides, is accompanied by Smith’s repeated voiceover declaration that “sex is a pain in the ass.”  The moment epitomizes the bad taste on display throughout the film.

            Smith and his pictures are gay icons of the 1960s New York underground film movement, but it’s doubtful that they were even intended for audiences outside of this scene.  As such, it is difficult for me to place them culturally; despite the fact that I acknowledge that in this right they are important documents of that time and place.  However, from an entertainment and mainstream artistic standpoint I feel confident in my assessment that they’re crap.

 Language: English

Runtime: 33 Minutes

Available @youtube.com

Grade: .5 Hats Off     

57: Heaven and Earth Magic (a.k.a. Film No. 12)

             The artist Harry Smith once described his Heaven and Earth Magic (1962) thusly:

           

            “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven.  Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land in terms of Israel and Montreal; the second part depicts the return to earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” 

            If any of Mr. Smith’s inane rambling sounds to you as though it would make an engaging and accessible film, I highly recommend that you immediately reevaluate your status as a film lover or reassess your relationship with recreational drugs.  This film is terrible.  A collection of magazine cutouts photographed in stop motion style and set to a soundtrack of guttural howls and shrieks, it barely constitutes any form of expression whatsoever.  The film’s write up in the 1001 tome hardly justifies its inclusion in the canon, as the author struggles to make excuses for Smith’s “work” (quotes original).  The review also includes notes that the piece is “abstract” and “folk” in nature (quotes original).

            The VHS box of the copy of Heaven and Earth Magic that I procured describes the film as “a graphic description of initiation, redemption and spiritual transformation couched in the language of Qabalah, alchemy, and experimental psychology.” It is my hope that my readers know crap when they see it, and when they read it, and in the case of both the film and this description I have a feeling that BS meters are already registering intolerable levels. 

            There is an upstart movement of individuals who believe that Harry Smith is the true unsung genius of the American avant-garde film scene.  They hold that Smith —who was suspected to be the son of Aleister Crowley— and his work have not yet gotten their due praise.  Let me assure you that these people, like those who followed Crowley, are morons.

Language: None

Runtime: 66 Minutes

Grade: .5 Hats Off

58: The Young and the Damned (a.k.a. Los Olvidados – Original Spanish Title)

            As I’ve noted before on my journey, Luis Buñuel is a filmmaker I have trouble with.  I don’t dislike all of his work, and in fact I find much of it to be interesting, but it’s worth noting again here that Buñuel was a director that Andre Bazin said exemplified “the cinema of cruelty.”  Once again, with his The Young and the Damned (1950), he seems to be trying to torture his audience, forcing them to look at the ugliest parts of the human condition.  Somehow it seems appropriate that the iconoclast and noted surrealist decided to take on the neorealist approach that had swept European cinema in the 1940s.  I’m almost certain that Buñuel reveled in the irony.  But he was not out to make a Mexican version of The Bicycle Thief (1948).  The Young and the Damned is a clear attempt at combining what others had done in Europe with what Buñuel had been doing for years; the first neo-surrealist picture.

            Working in Mexico City, Buñuel turned his cameras on the youth street gangs that fought for respect and territory in the booming capitol.  He focuses on the lives and interactions of two boys, both barely in their teens, the younger Pedro, who longs to be good and to win his mother’s approval, and the older Jaibo, the leader of Pedro’s gang.  Jaibo’s street credit comes from an oft-recalled escape from the reformatory, and though his toughness is rarely called into question, he seems habitually intent on proving it. Pedro is a loyal sidekick, and together he and Jaibo fleece market merchants and harass blind street musicians. They also work to recruit new members to their ranks, and though Pedro seems intent on a life of petty crime, he often laments for the love of his mother, who has banished him to the streets for misbehavior.

            Buñuel spends a great deal of time establishing these characters and their relationships.  Perhaps even too much time.  When the film’s moment of crisis finally comes, as Jaibo bludgeons a rival gang’s captain to death while Pedro stands guard, it seems muted, barreling standing out against the minutia of a number of senseless acts of violence and cruelty.  The remainder of the film centers on Pedro and Jaibo’s diverging reactions to the killing.  Both are scared at first, but as Jaibo’s fear slowly dissipates, Pedro’s sense of guilt begins to overwhelm him.  In one of the film’s most noted scenes Buñuel pulls out his entire bag of surrealist tricks, having a double exposed dreaming Pedro confronted by his mother and a piece of raw poultry before the angle of death confronts him for his crimes.  As the two boys’ mentalities continue to diverge, the film hurtles toward a shocking conclusion that only vaguely points to a question of any meaning.

              The Young and the Damned is a film chock full of powerful images.  It contains several heartbreaking sequences, and conveys a fairly unique overall mood.  Still, I can’t say that I enjoyed it.  It seems to simultaneously dare its audience to react and challenge them to remain still; to submit to its unique form of torture that only Buñuel could induce.  Yes, there is much going on here, but is anything really happening?  It is not a film devoid of movement, but one that seems to openly defy any form of progression.  This, of course, was likely Buñuel’s intent, and it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that he was awarded the prize for directing at Cannes for this piece.  It also doesn’t surprise me that better films have been made in the same vein as this material – most notably Fernando Meirelles City of God (2002).  However, with regard to my own experience with The Young and the Damned, I’ll say that I probably didn’t have as much fun with this picture as Buñuel was having with me.

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 85 Minutes

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off