Date: 13 July 2001 | Season: Miscellaneous | Tags: Cambridge Film Festival
THE JOY OF SUBVERSION: BLONDE COBRA & NO PRESIDENT
Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Friday 13 July 2001, at 10:30pm
Two underground archetypes, born of a deep disgust with existence, finding rapture in the rubbish dumps. Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith, doyens of the downside, were united by the gloom that saturated their everyday lives. With their shared horror of Technicolor America, they rose from the cesspool to revel in the garbage heap.
Not so much non-narrative as anti-narrative, these films constantly defeat and undermine their own success through their editing and structure. Private and social taboos are cast aside in two manic paeans to hopelessness.
Some people call it independent, experimental, avant-garde, underground, beat, trash, degenerate, incomprehensible, absurdist baloney. Some people don’t understand and some people don’t deserve to understand. Cinema of parody or cinema of paradise? Take these jewelled offerings, these fragments of true FREE CINEMA and run with it. (You might never catch up.)
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, Blonde Cobra, 1959-63, 33 min
Jack Smith, No President, 1967-70, 50 min
Screening as part of the 21st Cambridge Film Festival.
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE JOY OF SUBVERSION: BLONDE COBRA & NO PRESIDENT
Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Friday 13 July 2001, at 10:30pm
BLONDE COBRA
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, USA, 1959-63, b/w & colour, sound, 33 min
Blonde Cobra was shot by Bob Fleischner, and abandoned after a fall-out with the leading man. The footage was recovered and reassembled (with no knowledge of the original intention) by Ken Jacobs, whose own turbulent friendship with Smith underwent a brief reconciliation for the recording of the soundtrack. Emerging from a pile of rubble in his Lower East Side apartment, Jack Smith clambers above the shit-heap of depressed, depressing, depressive post-war USA. Black humour begat black leader as he recounts, in cine-darkness, his turgid dream of Madame Nescience. A live radio muscles in on the soundtrack and the continuous sewage-flow of topical babble is beaten into obscurity.
NO PRESIDENT
Jack Smith, USA, 1967-70, b/w, sound, 50 min
In No President, Smith’s particular distaste for society is embodied in his continued indulgence in failure. A work he was unable to complete in his lifetime, its downfall was the exhaustion from overstimulation he strove to portray. We’ve been left with a bewildering construction: found footage mixed with his own phantasmagorical tableaux vivants, chaos sound jumbled with records from his eclectic collection. Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, seen first in newsreels, then depicted by costumed creatures in grotesque set pieces, winds up auctioned on the block of a slave market. B-movie exotica tangled in delirious wonder. The collapse of order, again and again, over and out.
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