Blonde Cobra (1963)
½ — Blonde Cobra (1963)
Blonde Cobra sits at the ragged centre of the New York underground film scene of the early 1960s, a world orbiting figures like Jonas Mekas, Taylor Mead, and the Factory-adjacent circle that would later crystallise around Warhol. Ken Jacobs shot the footage in the late 1950s, featuring his friend and collaborator Jack Smith (who would go on to make Flaming Creatures the same year this was released), but the film sat unfinished for years before Jacobs handed the raw material to filmmaker Bob Fleischner, who edited it and added the rambling, confessional soundtrack. The result is less a conventional production than a salvaged object, assembled from fragments with no budget, no studio, and no apparent plan beyond self-expression.
Blonde Cobra (1963) is 30 minutes of aggressively self-indulgent nonsense masquerading as art. Ken Jacobs' experimental short feels less like a film and more like someone's private in-joke accidentally left playing on a projector. The image is degraded, the sound is muddy, the "structure" is nonexistent, and the entire enterprise radiates the smugness of art made solely for other avant-garde filmmakers to praise in academic journals. There's no rhythm, no emotional hook, no discernible point beyond "look how transgressive we are." What might have felt daring in a 1960s underground loft now reads as amateurish posturing, like watching someone riff unintelligibly in a mirror for half an hour and calling it cinema. It's a footnote in queer/experimental film, but as an actual viewing experience, it offers nothing but frustration and boredom. Some experimental films challenge you meaningfully. This one just wastes your time. If avant-garde cinema isn't your thing, Blonde Cobra will confirm every suspicion you ever had.
Rating: ½ | Year: 1963 | Watched: 2026-03-16
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
