Blond Cobra, directed by Ken Jacobs and starring Jack Smith, is inspired by two films Smith worshipped—Blonde Venus (starring Marlene Dietrich, 1932) and Cobra Woman (starring Maria Montez, 1944)—is screened alongside Smith’s own first feature, Flaming Creatures, completed on a budget of just 300 dollars. Both films, featuring drag performance and bold sexual imagery, were first shown together as a double bill at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Manhattan in 1963. Their reception soon proved to be extraordinarily polarized. Their screening at the New Bowery Theater in 1964 resulted in police response and arrest of those involved due to obscenity complaints. On the other hand, experimental film icon Jonas Mekas welcomed these films as the work of no ordinary director, describing them as a kind of "Baudelairean cinema" comprehensible only to a select few in his The Village Voice column. Even today, audience reactions to these films will likely remain polarized. Yet perhaps there can be little disagreement about their value in laying the foundations of underground cinema through radical experiment and a bold confrontation with taboo in the name of freedom of expression. (Molly KIM)