{"id":3357,"date":"2001-07-13T22:30:33","date_gmt":"2001-07-13T21:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=3357"},"modified":"2018-01-28T08:01:19","modified_gmt":"2018-01-28T08:01:19","slug":"joy-of-subversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2001\/07\/13\/joy-of-subversion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Joy of Subversion: Blonde Cobra & No President"},"content":{"rendered":"

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THE JOY OF SUBVERSION: BLONDE COBRA & NO PRESIDENT <\/strong>
\n Cambridge Arts Picturehouse<\/strong>
\n Friday 13 July 2001, at 10:30pm <\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Some people call it independent, experimental, avant-garde, underground, beat, trash, degenerate, incomprehensible, absurdist baloney. Some people don\u2019t understand and some people don\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n

Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, Blonde Cobra, 1959-63, 33 min<\/strong>
\nJack Smith, No President, 1967-70, 50 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

Screening as part of the 21st Cambridge Film Festival. <\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

<\/p>\n

THE JOY OF SUBVERSION: BLONDE COBRA & NO PRESIDENT
\n<\/strong>Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
\nFriday 13 July 2001, at 10:30pm<\/p>\n

BLONDE COBRA
\n<\/strong>Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, USA, 1959-63, b\/w & colour, sound, 33 min
\n<\/strong>Blonde Cobra<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

NO PRESIDENT
\n<\/strong>Jack Smith, USA, 1967-70, b\/w, sound, 50 min
\n<\/strong>In No President<\/em>, Smith\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Back to top<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[115],"class_list":["post-3357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-cambridge-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}