Flaming Creatures + Blonde Cobra

Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra were first shown on a double bill at the Bleecker Street Cinema in downtown Manhattan in 1963. In his “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice, Jonas Mekas hailed these films as a new, “Baudelairean Cinema,” likely to be misunderstood by all but a few. “A thing that may scare an average viewer,” he wrote, “is that this cinema is treading on the very edge of perversity. These artists are without inhibitions, sexual or any other kind.”

From the beginning Flaming Creatures had its detractors. Not everyone recognized the film’s startlingly original visual sensibility, appreciated its burlesque humour, or revelled in the cornucopia of queer delights that it offers. The film was soon engulfed by the notoriety that followed a police raid on a screening of the film at the New Bowery Theater in 1964. The film was confiscated, arrests were made, and a trial and subsequent appeal followed. The threat of obscenity charges loomed over the work of other underground artists too. Flaming Creatures can still polarise audiences. At its centre, after all, is a scene that has been described by critics as an “orgy,” “rape scene,” and “mock rape.”

Savagely funny

Over a period spanning the mid-1950s to the early-1960s, Smith and Jacobs made several films together. The black-and-white footage of Smith and Jerry Sims in Blonde Cobra was shot by Smith’s friend Bob Fleischner. Jacobs edited the footage, adding snatches of music and audio recordings of Smith, which he had made sometime earlier. For lengthy stretches of time, Smith’s often savagely funny ravings are accompanied by a black screen. But the film’s masterstroke is its screening instructions. An AM radio is to be planted in or near the audience. At two, very precisely described, moments in the film the radio volume is to be turned up and tuned into some kind of talk – any kind. As Jacobs put it at a screening of Blonde Cobra: “It always works!” The things ailing the world always become, in these moments, all too apparent.

Introduction Michele Pierson

On Oct 26 the films will be introduced by Michele Pierson. She is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is co-editor of Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (2011), and author of essays on American experimental film. Her most recent publication is “Feminist Filmmaking from the Ground-Up: Three Films from the 1980s,” in A Companion to Experimental Cinema, ed. Federico Windhausen. She is working on a book-length manuscript with the working title “The Accessibility of the Avant-Garde: Views from Experimental Cinema.”