Movies
Blonde Cobra
16mm, b/w & col., 28:00, USA 1959-63, Sound-film: Ken Jacobs, Images
gathered by Bob Fleischner, Performer: Jack Smith
Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob`s intention to create a
light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies, actually two separate stories that
were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling out over who should pay
for the raw stock destroyed in a fire when Jack`s cat knocked over a candle;
Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of `59 blue Bob showed me the
footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the
material, not as exquisite fragments of failure, of two failures, but as the
makings of a new entity. 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
for long enough to record his words and songs for the soundtrack. The phrases
he repeated into the tape recorder were all ones I`d at some time heard him
say; most were pet phrases he loved to recite, over and over, his lessons.
I played him selections from my 78 collection, music from the 20`s and 30`s,
some-times 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. Miracles of improvisation
issued forth and any lack of clarity in his delivery 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.
A small amount of my own previous shooting was cut into the film, the short
drowning in nescience colour sequence near the beginning.
BlondeCobra 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
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
limits enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a
regal screw off .
Little Stabs At Happiness
16mm, col., 18:00, USA 1963 Realization: Ken Jacobs Featuring Jack Smith
Down and person to person,
cinema officially gets grabbed back from the professionals here. Material was
cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100 rolls
were used, the timings fitted well with music on old 78`s. I was interested in
immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not
trivialised with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement. And breaking out of
step. (Ken Jacobs)
Chumlum
16mm, col., 28:00, USA 1964, Realization: Ron Rice, With Jack Smith, Beverly
Grant, Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga. Music: Angus McLise Sound: Tony Conrad
"A baroque-rococo dream space, people (actors, visions, people) weaving in and
out of one-an other`s spaces, minds, and bodies. One of the Underground`s best
and most influential films." (Peter Gidal)
Flaming Creatures
16mm, b/w, 45:00, USA 1963. Realization: Jack Smith
Flaming Creatures is a rare, modern work of art about joy an innocence.
Without any doubt, this innocence is composed of perverse - according to the
current acceptance of that term - and decadent, at least theatrical and
artificial themes. But I think, it`s just for that reason that the film attains
beauty and modernity. Flaming Creatures is a wonderful specimen of what
in a genre is named Pop Art. Jack Smith`s film possesses the casualness, the
arbitrariness and the unrestrainedness of Pop Art, its ingenuity and its
liberty towards morality. One of the great qualities of Pop Art is the manner
in which it swept the old imperratives about the position to take concerning
the subject of something.
The best works in what we used to call Pop Art suggest precisely that we
abandon the old habits of always approving or disapproving what is depicted in
art - and, in a broader sense, what we experience in life. Pop
Art favours new and wonderful patterns of behaviour that previously seemed to
be contradictory.
Flaming Creatures is also a brillant parody on sexuality itself, at the
same time it shows the lyricism of erotic compulsions. Concerning the visual,
it is full of contradictions. Very carefully elaborated visual effects
(dentelle-textures, falling flowers, and paintings ) are introduced in a
disorganized manner into clearly improvised scenes, in which typically feminine
bodies and other meager, hairy ones, would fall, dance and make love.
(SusanSontag, 1964)
