“My films are propaganda for certain ideas I have.” Fredric Hobbs
How does a film-maker whose work, in his heyday, conjoured references to Fellini, DeMille, Anger, Goya, Bergman, Buñuel, Jodorowsky, Truffaut – who was, in the words of Rolling Stone, “a kind of one-man American New Wave” – remain so unheralded in the 21st Century? Fredric Hobbs directed four features films – Troika (1969), Roseland (1971), Alabama’s Ghost (1973) and Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), only one of which is readily available to audiences in 2022. And if it wasn’t for that one, Godmonster – first championed on DVD by Something Weird Video and, most recently, via a 4K preservation by the American Genre Film Archive, as well as one holy tome (Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA) – we might not know of Hobbs the film-maker at all.
The paradox of Godmonster, with its draw-you-in title and perenially entertaining sheep monster creature feature vibes, is that it kept Hobbs’ name alive in cult cinema circles while narrowing his reputation to B-movie also-ran. But even that notoriety is unfair on Godmonster itself, a film that handily resists easy classification and continues over-delivering to audiences sucked in by its daffy dressing. (Laird Jimenz describes the titular monster: “An indescribable phantasm which a Lovecraft protagonist would encounter shortly before going mad, but rendered for a Bert I Gordon production.”)
According to Jimenez, “Hobbs wanted to take art out of the museum and meet people where they were. One of those places was the movies.” Beyond that, even, Hobbs had strong ideas about art itself. “If we could bring ourselves to communicate on a level of aesthetics, we could stop violence.” He explained:
“We each of us should be able to build our own structure and environment to live in, and avoid the glass boxes. And then communicate, criticise, on the aesthetic level.”
Another Hobbs’ aphorism, “Nobody really gives a shit about art except artists,” lands a little differently if we’re all of us potential artists. Elsewhere, he expounded, “Aesthetic communication may stop wars. If a man would build his own chartreuse gargoyle and live in it rather than glass and steel boxes, he could communicate better with his neighbor.”
Hobbs was a visual artist, a painter-sculptor (“film is just another form of kinetic art,” he proclaimed) and examples of his work can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA (New York & San Franscisco) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Thrower notes:
“Fredric Hobbs is first and foremost an artist, specifically a painter and sculptor, and he has maintained a presence in the art world from the 1950s to the present day … It’s worth bearing this in mind before considering his movies, which, for all their abundant qualities, are best seen as a wild, feverish digression from his fine art work.”
A 1962 write-up in Artforum found the influence of Goya, Velazques and El Greco in his paintings. In 1970, critic Palmer D French noted that film-making, namely Troika, had given Hobbs’ “diverse interests and capabilities” a new focus, resulting in “possibly the most successful and compelling [show] that he has so far presented”. French summed up Hobbs’ overall style as, “a unique, eclectic synthesis of which the dominant active ingredient is a characteristically theatrical fusion of German Expressionist mannerisms with a symbolism compounded of Freudian and neo-Gothic mystical elements.”
One piece, “another fantastically sculptured automobile body,” entitled Trojan Horse (1968), features in the processional scenes in Troika and later in Alabama’s Ghost. Similar kinetic “parade sculptures” had previously caught attention:
After a number of false starts a Fiat motor car was secured upon whose girth would rest what was later called a “Parade,” or a parade sculpture. Hobbs used the auto as an armature upon which he put fiberglass and magnesite wings, fins, tunnels, flaps, multi-color emblems and finally a number of different hues varying from a deep red-purple to chromium yellow. From inside this doom buggy, recorded Spanish hillbilly music sounds for the benefit of passerby and rider. The construction of Hobbs’ truly mobile sculpture took between two and three months and at the end of the construction, with proper fanfare, Mr Hobbs and a co-pilot drove the sculpture to New York City where it arrived without incident.
James Monte, Artforum, 1965
When his too-brief digression in feature film-making was over, Hobbs simply continued on as a working artist, notably as the self-proclaimed founder of the Art-Eco movement. Hobbs Troika‘s legend, though, rests mostly upon its inclusion in Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents, within a large chapter dedicated to Hobbs. Thrower’s writing is the only serious and sustained meditation on Hobbs’ ouevre, and benefits from long conversations with the film-maker, before his death in 2018. One of the very few people to have seen Hobbs’ debut in the 50 years since its first, modest theatrical run, Thrower makes an excellent hype man. “Troika,” he explains, “particularly in its extended third movement – comes at you with banners fluttering, a phalanx of mysterious heraldry, and the pomp of alien orchestras blaring: it’s no wonder you reel away at the end, straining for superlatives.”
“Hobbs’ films aim heroically for the stars, often they hit, and where they miss you feel impelled to help him fix them up so they can realize their full potential. In balance, they are extraordinary, immensely accomplished and even more promising works, and ultimately they carry a powerful personal message about individual salvation; in this sense, they succeed in extending art into life, to a potential mass audience.”
Thomas Albright, Rolling Stone, April 29, 1971
How to describe Troika, then? Rolling Stone: “Troika is a fable about creative frustration liberated through sex in a momentous crescendo of excruciating intensity.” It’s “a film about creation,” according to Thrower, “a three-part avant-garde surrealistic comedy with polemical asides and documentary footage.” A conteporaneous New York Times review described the film’s third movement (Hobbs privately identified the three parts of Troika as The Chef, Alma Mater and The Blue People), as “Halloween on a Martian landscape.” Thrower expands:
“The Blue People segment of Troika is a treasure chest of visual riches and symbolic enigmas that has to be seen to be believed... Hobbs is basically out on his own here, creating a mysterious realm populated by astonishing anomalous constructions and conveyed through exceptional dreamlike imagery.”
“While his subsequent movies veer between astounding and frustrating,” Thrower concludes, Troika is his masterpiece.” Perhaps it’s that mercurial quality that’s partly responsible for the visibility of Hobbs’ work in 2022. His subsequent films, all remarkable in their own way, have their own eccentricities (not to mention not-uncommon distribution issues). Roseland has been described as a “philosophical fuck film”; per Rolling Stone at the time, “a skin-flick that would also be a subversive satire on skin-flicks.” (Hobbs explained, “I wanted to see if I could take a piece of shit and make it carry an artistic statement.”) In Nightmare USA, Thrower attempts to sketch Alabama’s Ghost, a horror satire part-inspired by Carter the Great, with, “Imagine Alejandro Jodorowsky remaking Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – blaxploitation style.” Godmonster, of course, continues to compel and confound. As a recent review observed, “If it were just god, or just monster, the title might be more readily digestible – but the ungainly combination is harder to pin down,” concluding, “its depiction of an America obsessed with nostalgic retrogression, and ever open to exploitation in all its forms, seems entirely prescient.”
About Troika, there’s a lot more to be said and discovered. Hopefully, our new restoration will build on Thrower’s work to support the continued re-evaluation of Hobbs’ ouevre. For the time being, there are no further screenings planned after our restoration’s premiere but, having been out of circulation for so long, Troika is no longer lost. As a primer for new audiences, Thrower offers, “Hobbs’ creative ‘troika’ is anger; horror; humour – all of which can be found in abudance in his work. Attempts to read his films without recourse to all three are doomed to failure; which of the troika gains ascendancy is entirely up to you.”
Sean Welsh
Matchbox Cine debut the 2K restoration of Fredric Hobbs’ Troika at Weird Weekend on Friday 28.10.22 at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. Stephen Thrower joins us in person to introduce the screening.
Godmonster of Indian Flats screens at Weird Weekend the following day, Saturday 29.10.22.Tickets and festival passes available here.