COBRA WOMAN

ABOUT THE FILM:

When Susan Sontag wrote her essential 1964 book Notes on “Camp,” she defined the idea of camp as “a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content.” She also differentiated between “pure camp” – something that takes itself so seriously that it becomes hilarious to audiences who grasp its shortcomings – and “camp which knows itself to be camp,” where the makers are fully aware of the ludicrousness that has been baked into the material and the presentation.

For a look at “pure camp,” there’s no better place to start than the 1944 Maria Montez vehicle COBRA WOMAN, a deliciously over-the-top exercise in exotica, colonial fetishization, and general absurdity. (The trailer calls it “A Pagan Sensation!”) Montez stars as twin princesses – one good, one evil, both in love with strapping Jon Hall – in a tale that incorporates volcanoes, blowguns, Sabu, a forbidden dance of the snakes, and a valuable stone that Montez memorably calls the “Cobra jool.”

COBRA WOMAN’s campiness has given it a lasting cultural footprint: Queer experimental-film icon Kenneth Anger cited it as his favorite film, and Gore Vidal’s novel Myron involves the protagonist finding himself trapped in an endless loop of a very COBRA WOMAN–esque film called SIREN OF BABYLON, also starring Montez.

Program notes by author Alonso Duralde

FORMAT: 35mm

DISTRIBUTOR: Universal

COUNTRY: USA