What’s it like being mental? I know this seems like a crass and antagonistic question to pose, but for some who suffer from various clouds of mental health issues (like myself), its something I always feel is on the tip of other people’s tongues if only they could flick it off. What does it look like to them? The Other Side of the Underneath, feminist surrealist Jane Arden’s 1972 film about a group of girls’ visions, therapy, nightmares and exorcism from “schizophrenia”, filmed in South Wales and, reportedly, with scenes filmed as the cast members peaked on LSD, is a raw, extreme piece of British psychotronica that feels filled with fumes of anxiety and banshee-delivered primality.
Beginning with a piece of prose on the screen about consciously awakening from a metaphoric coma, a rebirth from the celeste of mortal darkness, we’re instantly given a series of visual textures that defines the rest of the experience. Coal black muds and barren grass greens. A wind-whipped, poisoned air that will chloroform you before the cloth does. Industrial, rural textures of quarry town plumes. Mineshafts and flowers. Chimneys and horses. Isolated and cold. Smashed mirror handovers like fragments of the mind are gifts. From house, to church, to dream, to hillside, the film feels that pastoral chill across its forehead. The camera close enough to the girls in the home to be distorted at the extremities of the screen, close enough you can feel the heat off their eyeballs. Even the sound design coalesces with the misama on-screen. Doors creak open and merge into cello string screeches. A character’s vision of herself in a corner comes to play the aforementioned instrument as she scores her own mania:
“One cell, Multiply”
“One cell, Multiply”
As the strings are plucked. The film’s identity becomes at one with an incantation of hysteria that never leaves, even after the sound/visuals part from one another. There’s a genuine, beatified surreality to everything that normally you’d scoff at an artist for (and it does feel closer to pretentious at times) but the honesty and frightening lack of leash here makes it a true experimental, in-camera rage of catatonia and fear.
Arden’s filmmaking-as-therapy sees her making an endurance for audience and crew, as her catharsis of making art becomes antagonizing. This is meant to be a document of hysteria. Every scene filled with howls, wails, glassy tears and screams are like opening a vein to god. The girls, Arden’s real life theatre troupe, named Holocaust, are forced by character and, by extension, reality, to confront, hit and be intimate with themselves (and Arden’s husband Jack Bond, who appears briefly). Even Jane herself is inserted into the film as a therapist, making everything feel blended across interpretation. It’s a perverse, chaotic sentiment that turns the film into something almost confrontationally personal.
There are scenes of therapy that are catastrophically helpless, oppressed by ghosts of the mind. Visions of demons by bedside, sheep as protection totems, feather showers on wedding days that collide as funerals, contradictory displays of sexuality that wax and wane from euphoria to self-flagellation. The lack of true cohesion gives off a miasma so acrid that it clouds the mind. Even as it descends into Farmland Elvis sing-alongs, Cabaret nudity and Religious Martyrdom, the films sense of razor-edge frenzy never stops, and its dischordancy might stay as a constant refrain in your head long after the film ends.
As one of the of the characters states in the aforementioned therapy scenes, “Under each of us is all the pain. All the love. All this pain, its so simple. Just empty it out, there’s no change.”
The girls’ lack of diagnosis or closure is the fear that all of us have. An ear-gnawing rat that keeps us up at night on that fine line between sleep. What if I’m never better? Will those circles around my eyes be embossed forever as rancid trophies, or will I be crucified as a public cause? And something like The Other Side of the Underneath can only say, “What an obscenity”,as you see a projection of yourself on-screen.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom
In the current climate of media, there has been an astronomical rise in true crime content. Big budget programmes about serial killers that inspire children’s Halloween costumes, podcasts detailing murder investigations that gain the listenership to affect, dozens of documentaries a year about horrific events beamed into our homes through Netflix and other streaming services. These compilations of tragedy and horror often reduce real pain and loss to pure sensation, turning the deplorable into entertainment. In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, he theorises on why so many are drawn to spectacles of tragedy. His thesis is that human beings are so interested in the grotesque manners of death as a way to alleviate their own anxieties about eternal darkness. Death is often so random and meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but in the world of true crime, death is explosive and unforgettable. Death has a meaning in true crime, even if that meaning often boils down to being the unwilling provider of late-night entertainment. Instead of true crime making it hard for people to sleep or go outside, it often seems to act as a calming supplement for its most regular consumers, in the way that car crashes provide stimulation to the characters in DeLillo’s world.
True crime largely oscillates between three major areas. The first is the examination of serial killers, the mindset and deeds of murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy compel a bizarre amount of people. The second is the mystery, where a documentary or a podcast take the audience through the potential outcomes step by step, either revealing the truth by the end or allowing the consumer to theorise their own murderer. In the case of the hit podcast Serial, the outcry of millions of outraged listeners has actually contributed to the overturning of a murder charge. The third is the more bizarre crimes. The kind of crimes that immediately take the observer by surprise, the ones that could be scattered in headlines for decades and still incite shock and awe. One of the most famous shock and awe cases is Lorena Bobbitt cutting her husband’s penis off, which has inspired numerous documentaries examining every detail of their relationship, even 25 years after the dismemberment.
While it’s true that true crime has reached new heights with the rise of podcasting and streaming services, the sensationalist fascination with depravity has been with us as a species for a long time. The case of Amy Fisher and the reaction to it from the television industry are living proof of this. The lurid tale of an underage girl shooting her boyfriend’s wife in the head, Fisher’s case fell firmly into the third designation of true crime media, a crime that was so compelling that three different television networks produced their own version of Fisher’s lustful murder. These three TV movies (The Amy Fisher Story starring Drew Barrymore, Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story starring Alyssa Milano, and Amy Fisher: My Story starring Noelle Parker) and the case itself have been largely forgotten by time, as new scandals and stories have dominated the airwaves.
However, filmmaker Dan Kapelovitz has resurrected these three forgotten artefacts of early ’90s pop culture, forging a singular narrative by splicing footage of the films together. Sometimes Amy Fisher’s face will change halfway through scenes, sometimes her parents will change, and occasionally all three Fishers will converge together in a single frame. The limitations of these films’ portrayal of Fisher and her lover Joey Buttafuoco are evident. Kapelovitz cannot change the intent from all three dramas to demonise Fisher, with at least one of the films depicting her as a crazed sex maniac who has purposefully sabotaged the life of her much older boyfriend. The misogyny is omnipresent in how her relationship with Buttafuoco is framed, and especially in the sequences following her murder of his wife. The frequent transitions between films during the second half amplifies how nasty these pictures were towards Fisher, with her descent into violence and madness being told with a perverted glee from all three initial filmmakers.
The sudden transitions from actress to actress, and most importantly, the quality in video production, take a little while to settle into. Having a shot of a crazed, beaded actor snorting cocaine behind the wheel of his car within the first couple of minutes, before suddenly cutting to another film’s shots of an insane asylum, was a particularly sobering way to start this experiment off. Yet, for decent stretches of the 75-minute runtime, the chopped nature of the presentation becomes almost irrelevant, as the tragedy of Fisher’s story dominates everything. There are moments where the constant switches start to blend together, where Fisher and Buttafuoco and all of the other characters in this story become unified figures, before Kapelovitz performs another trick in the editing booth to keep the distinction in the audience’s mind.
Triple Fisher does not reveal the hidden merits of these three individual films about the murder, in fact, it makes them all look terrible. There is little artistic merit in these pieces on their own, but Kapelovitz has found a way to make them mean something together. It is such a damning showcase of the way that the vultures within true crime media operated around cases of tragedy like this, and makes it clear how little things have changed in the last 30 years. A version of Fisher’s story told today would likely be more sympathetic and introspective about how she was manipulated by Buttafuoco, go further into her being a victimised underage girl instead of a malicious jezebel. But it would still likely end at the same conclusion of exploitative gawking, as most true crime seems to. DeLillo might have been right in 1985 when he wrote that “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them”. After all, if you’re reading this, you’re interested in the catastrophe too.
Logan Kenny is an autistic, bisexual writer from Glasgow, full time student, occasional podcaster. Has written for Cinematary, Little White Lies, The Film Stage and a few other places that you might have heard of. Big fan of Winnie the Pooh
Between 1967 and 1979, Jane Arden and her partner Jack Bond (in various combinations) wrote, directed, and produced three features. The second of these was The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), developed from the critically and financially successful stage production A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets, and Witches (1971). Enjoying runs at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and London’s The Open Space, the show had been a collaborative production devised by “Holocaust”, the UK’s first all-female theatre group. Included amongst their ranks were the multi-media artist Penny Slinger, Shakespearean actress Sheila Allen, and feminist critic and “underground” theatre practitioner Natasha Morgan.
Detail from Holocaust Manifesto (1971).
Despite this success, between 1983 and 2009, the Arden-Bond films were unable to view in Britain. Some even believed them missing, whilst many of those involved in the making of these deeply-personal and often-fraught productions had yet to rediscover a platform or desire to talk about them again. Consequently, the films were neglected in both writing and conversation. Even in the immediate aftermath of their resurfacing and restoration in 2009, discussion of the Arden-Bond films remained sparse. It has only been gradually across the past decade, and predominantly only in the last four years, that more writing has started to emerge on this work, thanks mostly to work of feminist groups such as Another Gaze and Invisible Women, and to PhD candidates invariably connected to these initiatives.
In many ways, it is this sense of unearthing something “forgotten” that has fuelled the revived interest in Jane Arden and her collaborators. Accounts from scholars and programmers often recall their first, tantalising discovery of Arden’s work, and the obsessive connecting of dots that followed. Susan Croft, for instance, recounts her happening upon a scuffed and faded copy of an Arden play text in the now-defunct radical London bookshop, Collet’s, back in 1981. It was to be a ‘significant, joyous’ discovery, that would in no small part inspire her Unfinished Histories project, salvaging and preserving memories from a bygone era of experimentation and rebellion.
My own “origin story”, as it were, bears many parallels with Croft’s. I first encountered Arden by chance, whilst browsing a second-hand bookshop on the Great Western Road in Autumn 2018. Not a complete work, merely a provocative title – “Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven”– listed in a catalogue of plays included in the back pages of another, tangentially related text. It was enough to spark four years of internet rabbit holes, email interviews, and convoluted inter-library loans.
From performance of Jane Arden’s Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969) in the Drury Lane Arts Lab. Photograph by Peter Smith.
In the limited writing I devoured both in the immediate days that followed and in the subsequent years, as increasingly more became available, I observed two interesting trends. What caught my attention was that, although these two trends could be observed in almost every single response to these films, the two ideas seemed to be in complete opposition to one another.
The first was a frequent tendency to identify the films of Arden and her collaborators as completely unique, as divergent from British Cinema. ‘What do you think of when you think of British film?’ begins an introductory note for Arden and Bond’s final feature. ‘Probably not the 1979 puzzle picture that is Anti-Clock.’ Even Jack Bond himself appears to have adopted this stance when he proposes (somewhat audaciously) that his work with Arden is ‘not in a context.’ The films are positioned as something alternative, outside of history, perhaps even a little dangerous, and they are marketed consequently. After all, isn’t that part of the fun of watching a film at a “Weird Weekend” festival? That sense of stumbling across some hidden, esoteric gold; of entering in to some rare, in-the-know club?
The second trend, equally prevalent, was the desire to make comparisons with filmmakers working before, alongside and after. Contemporaneous reviews of Separation and The Other Side of the Underneath were laced with references to Accident (1967)and Blow-Up (1966), to Bergman and Fellini, whilst more recent writing has considered resonances with Derek Jarman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Maya Deren. But how could a film be so unlike anything else and yet so similar? How could one critic (here unnamed) claim an Arden film was ‘so unique’ and yet ‘so quintessentially of its time’ in almost the same breath?
It begs the question: just how other is a film like The Other Side of the Underneath? For British Cinema scholar Julian Petley, not that much:
‘the vaunting and valorising of certain British films on account of their “realism” entails as its corollary […] the dismissal and denigration of those deemed un- or non-realist. […] [There’s] another, repressed side of British cinema, a dark, disdained thread weaving its way through the length and breadth of that cinema.’
As we start to trace that thread and connect those dots, it becomes clear that, without diminishing the astonishing power or achievement of The Other Side of the Underneath, this film was not born in a vacuum. Rather, the work of Jane Arden and all her collaborators emerged from and fed back into a vibrant network of people, institutions, and ideas. As Penny Slinger – a member of Holocaust and “Visual Consultant” on The Other Side of the Underneath – would be the first to remind us, collaboration is an essential component of art, and ‘no woman is an island.’
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
Although The Other Side of the Underneath may have gone unseen for almost thirty years, this does not mean that those involved in its making were obscure figures. By the late-1960s, Jane Arden was already pretty notorious: infamous in London’s “Underground” scene, and recognisable to many due to her outspoken appearances on television on panel shows such as Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life. Certainly, her reputation was such that Jim Haynes felt her a safe (or should that be a profitably “unsafe”) pair of hands to commission a play he hoped would bring audiences in their droves to raise funds for the iconic, if financially unviable, Drury Lane Arts Lab. The result was the much-lauded Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), co-directed by Jack Bond.
Anecdotally, Arden was even a subject of gossip in certain circles, with her husband Philip Saville’s affair with the artist Pauline Boty rumoured to have inspired the multiple-Academy Award-winning film Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie.
Similarly, artist and actress Penny Slinger was gaining a public platform by the end of sixties, and across the seventies could be seen on talk shows and cultural programming. Both Slinger and Arden were interviewed and invited to write in a range of mainstream and “underground” publications, including Cosmopolitan, The Observer, Spare Rib, and International Times [IT]. As well as helping their ideas to reach large readerships, these newspapers and magazines also often featured commissioned or reproduced pieces of poetry and visual art.
When the Holocaust group held their first meeting in 1970, not only did these women already have a platform, but they were incredibly focused and organised when it came to their mission. They even released a manifesto, as the British “Free Cinema” movement had done before them in 1956 (although a radical feminist desire to ‘explode’ the language of the patriarchy means its content often tends towards oblique poetics).
Detail from Holocaust Manifesto (1971)
To understand the contexts from which The Other Side of the Underneath emerged, we must also explore the crucial role played by the “Underground” venues in which Arden and Holocaust’s work was staged, such as the Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967-69) – subsequently the Robert Street Arts Lab (1969-71) after closure of the original – and The Open Space on Tottenham Court Road (1968-1976). These were spaces where one could expect to run into such legendary figures as David Bowie, John and Yoko, and William S Burroughs. More crucially, these were also spaces where artists like Holocaust’s members could share their work, network with other artists, and keep a finger on the pulse. In a recent account, David Curtis elaborates that we cannot underestimate ‘the vital role played by the Labs in the development of [their visitors’] chosen art forms, as artists came together around a common vision.’
The venues not only had an impact on the ideological development of the work that emerged from them, but also influenced their aesthetic development. Early productions, such as Jeff Nuttall’s no.14 – The Cage Show (1967), were described as ‘characteristic of much that followed on the Lab’s stage in their mix of aggression, physical performance and improvisation.’ There is the suggestion of a distinctive Arts Lab aesthetic, an idea developed in a description of Portable Theatre’s Inside Out (1968) from the following year, which was ‘cinematic, in the sense that it consisted of a number of short scenes with blackouts.’ This, Tony Bicât writes, ‘became the house style.’
These characteristics can be observed in Arden’s work across mediums. Improvisation, aggression, and physicality all converge in the “group therapy” sequences of The Other Side of the Underneath, where (under the influence of LSD), Holocaust members were invited to delve into repressed trauma in extended sequences which often climax in overwhelming outbursts of pain and emotion. We can also observe an affinity with the ‘cinematic […] short scenes’ common in Arts Labs shows in The Other Side of the Underneath’s attention to montage and episodic vignettes.
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
The UFO Club was another popular hotspot of the ’60s “Underground”, whose personnel overlapped with the founders and administrators of The Arts Labs. The UFO also facilitated an exchange of talent and wielded an aesthetic influence on Arden’s work. The liquid light projections of Mark Boyle, for instance, which regularly featured at both The UFO and The Labs, are also to be found in Arden and Bond’s Separation (1967), where they provide integral structural and artistic meaning to the film. Even following her collaboration with Boyle, his influence remains in Arden work. In The Other Side of the Underneath,we see lights projected on top of the performers as a means of visualising the subject matters (hetero-patriarchal authoritarianism, for example) which have oppressed the characters/actors.
Furthermore, a visit to The UFO or The Arts Labs was often an overwhelmingly embodied, multi-sensory experience. One could expect a raucous live band (such as the one we encounter in The Other Side) playing alongside projections of Mark Boyle’s lights, whilst simultaneously some experimental Andy Warhol films and recorded sitar music competed for attentions. When Jack Henry Moore, a ‘key countercultural figure involved in London’s psychedelic UFO club’, co-directed Vagina Rex, it was little surprise that the production ‘overwhelmed the audience’s senses.’ All this perhaps informed Arden’s penchant for rapid cutting and montage; for her combinations of various film stocks and tapes (most evident in Anti-Clock); for her particular attention to the expressive potentials of synchronous and asynchronous soundscapes; as well as a tendency to feature screens, and projections, within screens.
Still from Separation (1967).
The label “Underground” that became attached to these venues and artists is also perhaps misleading. By 1970, the success of the Labs had inspired a mushrooming of similar hubs across Britain, which Richard Neville argued helped to further spread and popularise their aesthetic styles: ‘it is by interlacing the country with such outposts of cultural revolution that the Underground has consolidated itself.’ Indeed, sites like The Labs, The Open Space, and UFO contributed to a slackening of boundaries between what was considered dominant and what was considered “counter-” culture. As theatre historian and Channel 4 executive Peter Ansorge notes, ‘between 1968 and 1973 [The Arts Labs] played as vital a part in the life of our subsidised theatre as the Royal Court, National or Royal Shakespeare Company.’
Peter Brook, then co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was often known to pop a head in and stand at the back for performances at The Arts Labs, and was rumoured to have attended a performance of Vagina Rex. As Sheila Allen recalled, ‘that’s where [Brook] went most weeks to find out what was new,’ and it is fascinating to note the various ways in which Brook and Arden’s works appear to influence one another, with their shared interests in cruelty, in Brechtian songs, and in placing large demands on their audiences.
Still from The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
Furthermore, many of the key figures working in these venues and alongside the Holocaust group hailed from institutions that could hardly be described as “underground”. In fact, quite the opposite, with many being educated and first meeting in prestigious cultural institutions such as the University of Cambridge and the Slade College of Art. The Chelsea College of Art alone provided three members to the Holocaust group: Liz Danciger, Susanka Fraey, and Penny Slinger.
We might speculate that it was in one of the arts schools that Sally Potter could have first encountered the Holocaust group, as she was regularly performing in their spaces with the “Group Events” collective in the late-60s. Perhaps Potter attended a performance of Vagina Rex whilst involved with the early days of the London Filmmakers Co-operative, then housed at the Drury Lane Arts Lab at the same time as Arden’s play was being performed. Is it conceivable that the vision of the all-women crew on The Gold Diggers (1983) might have taken its cue from the Holocaust project?
In resisting the desire to single out The Other Side of the Underneath as an isolated, anomalous film, we instead insist upon its firm place in the British cinematic and cultural canon. Hailing from a period which is often conceptualised as a series of ‘success waves: anger, satire, Swinging London, hippiedom, Hollywood-led cosmopolitanism…’ perhaps we might consider the achievement of these women as belonging to, if not a fully-fledged movement, then perhaps an additional moment, with a thread of influences and influencees that mark the film as both urgent and important.
Matthew Gray
The Other Side of the Underneath screens at Weird Weekend III, 12:30 on Saturday 29.10.22 at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, part of the House of Psychotic Women strand. Matthew Gray will join us to introduce the film.Get your tickets here.
Matthew is somehow making a living doing their dream job of reading scripts and supporting emerging screenwriters. They also love to write about and programme films, with a particular interest in those mavericks and outliers that don’t quite conform to our dominant narratives of British Cinema history.
“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.”
Hobbs’ Trojan Horse sculpture
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.”
Scenes from Troika (NB stills taken from earlier archival copy, not the new restoration)
“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.”
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.
