Visuals: Two films from San Francisco artist Frederic Hobbs
Frederic Hobbs is a San Francisco artist who began as a violent, expressionistic painter and sculptor of contemporary Witches’ Sabbaths, sacrificial rites, and other offspring of The Sleep of Reason. In the early Sixties, he started moving his art into the streets, first by way of mutilated Everymen, deformed Earth Mothers and, grotesque demons that rolled about on wheels; later with mythological monsters rising out of procrustean slags of plexiglass mounted on stripped-down auto chassis, which he drove cross country while wearing an orange space suit.
In the last three years, Hobbs has turned to epic, feature-length color film fantasies, first with a “modern morality play” called Troika, and now Roseland, a “metaphysical skin-flick” or “philosophical fuck film.” The idea is to extend art into life; in form, at least, Troika never moves much beyond expressionistic theater, while Roseland is a relatively more conventional film in the sense that it is observed rather than experienced. Hobbs’ theater, however, is unique, powerful, and, in Troika’s overwhelming finale, total. His approach to film courts comparison to Fellini in sweep and style, to Bergman in concentration and intensity, and to Truffaut in the whimsical use of plagiarisms and paraphrases of old movie classics and in deft juxtaposition of moods and genres, all adding up to a kind of one-man American New Wave. Hobbs’ production methods hold the promise of a new alternative both to Hollywood and the solo operation: The overground-underground film, independently conceived, written, and directed; filmed by top professional cameramen; acted by everyone from professionals to amateurs, pro basketball players, and burlesque queens; making use of original paintings and sculptures as backgrounds and props;— – and all this zeroing in at less than $40,000, including the enlargement from 16 millimeter to 35.
Both Troika and Roseland reflect a kind of primitive, eccentric, erratic, and brilliant talent, deceptively polished, raw and unwashed, filled with flashes of madgenius and shot through with serious flaws; depending on your point of view, the two films are qualified triumphs or qualified failures. They are what Dwight MacDonald used to call bad good films, as opposed to good bad films. The latter are hopeless beyond repair because they are impeccable mediocrities. 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 and, with Roseland, even to the confines of the skin-flick house.
Hobbs sees himself as a kind of one-man revolution or, more precisely, an apocalypse; from this stem his strongest artistic virtues, as well as some of his shortcomings. His goal is a new Eden, his strategy a universal spiritual catharsis, a liberation of both creative and sexual energies from the traditional and more newly established forms of social and personal bondage. His major weapons are a strange mixture of satire and seriousness, lyricism and savage attack, bundled up in a package of surrealism and symbol, shock, surprise, and self-parody.
Hobbs’ two major inspirations have been Goya and the folk idols used in pagan rituals and primitive religious processions; like the scapegoats of ancient Judea which were burdened with the community’s collective sins and guilts and then driven away, Hobbs’ early “parade sculptures” were objects that you confronted with a momentary shock of horrific recognition, followed by a cleansing, joyous laughter as you watched them rattle down the street.
That, at least, was the idea, and if the average man-on-the-street didn’t respond to the full significance of such symbols as the Trojan Horse, that was more his problem than Hobbs.’ The same inspiration lies behind the films, though with different approaches and emphases – —the oppressive social institutions, the personal guilts, fears, frustrations, and shackling dogmas are piled up in a dense, cumulative crescendo under which the individual finally cracks into sanity, or is symbolically killed and reborn.
Troika is a fable about creative frustration liberated through sex in a momentous crescendo of excruciating intensity; Roseland is a parable of sexual hangups purged through art in a sustained mood of outrageous parody, caricature, and satire.
Roseland grew out of Troika in a curious way. Following Troika’s relative success in the art house circuit, Hobbs was approached by the San Francisco skin-flick czar, Habib Afif Carouba, with the proposition that he film a feature-length porny. Hobbs responded to the challenge in typical fashion: he would do a skin-flick that would also be a subversive satire on skin-flicks. “I wanted to see if I could take a piece of shit and make it carry an artistic statement,” says Hobbs.
Carouba put up most of the money, while Hobbs dashed out a scenario and assembled the crew of top cameramen who worked on Troika (Gordon Mueller, of Inside North Vietnam, and William Heick, of Mark Tobey: Artist): he gathered a cast ranging from E. Kerrigan Prescott, an Old Vic’s veteran, to burlesque dancers Marilyn Mansfield and Tiny Bubbles, as well as such supporting groups as the Loading Zone and Magic Theater, Filming took a total of 27 days, and the budget came in at a little more than $35,000. Largest single item was for photography, with most of the other principals accepting offers of a piece of the action. Hobbs says he was given a completely free hand in the production, other than having to see to it that the sex scenes were duly prolonged and that “no one should laugh during the fucking.”