Cobra Woman is a 1944 American South Seas adventure film from Universal Pictures , directed by Robert Siodmak that stars Maria Montez , Jon Hall , and Sabu . Shot in Technicolor , this film is typical of Montez's career at Universal, and, although mostly forgotten today by the general public, is venerated by film buffs as a camp classic for its legendary phallic snake-dance and Montez's words: "Geev me that Cobra jewl (sic)".
31-479: Avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger has called it his favorite film. Film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film three stars out of four and called it a camp classic. The beautiful Tollea is abducted and taken to Cobra Island, where she discovers that the Queen is her grandmother. Hava warns the angered Ramu not to go after Tollea, but he sets sail for the forbidden island, with his young friend Kado accompanying him as
62-460: A dialectical approach to such political stances by avant-garde artists and the avant-garde genre of art. Sociologically, as a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists, writers, architects, et al. produce artefacts — works of art, books, buildings — that intellectually and ideologically oppose the conformist value system of mainstream society. In the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch " (1939), Clement Greenberg said that
93-475: A cultural term, avant-garde identified a genre of art that advocated art-as-politics, art as an aesthetic and political means for realising social change in a society. Since the 20th century, the art term avant-garde identifies a stratum of the Intelligentsia that comprises novelists and writers, artists and architects et al. whose creative perspectives, ideas, and experimental artworks challenge
124-549: A post-modern time when the modernist ways of thought and action and the production of art have become redundant in a capitalist economy. Parting from the claims of Greenberg in the late 1930s and the insights of Poggioli in the early 1960s, in The De-Definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks (1983), the critic Harold Rosenberg said that since the middle of the 1960s the politically progressive avant-garde ceased being adversaries to artistic commercialism and
155-474: A princess you had to treat her like one all through lunch but if she was a slave girl you could kick her around anyhow and she wouldn't object: Method Acting before its time you might say." A contemporary review of the film by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times reported that "the submissive audience is witchingly rocked to sleep with as wacky an adventure fable as was ever dished up outside
186-417: A stowaway. A panther attacks Ramu, who is saved by a dart from Kado's deadly blowgun . They continue the search for Tollea, unaware that the high priestess of the island is Naja, her twin sister. The queen has ordered Tollea to be forcibly returned to Cobra Island only so she can displace her evil sister. Ramu mistakenly becomes involved with Naja, who falls in love with him. Kado is captured and tortured by
217-525: Is another definition of "Avant-gardism" that distinguishes it from "modernism": Peter Bürger, for example, says avant-gardism rejects the "institution of art" and challenges social and artistic values, and so necessarily involves political, social, and cultural factors. According to the composer and musicologist Larry Sitsky , modernist composers from the early 20th century who do not qualify as avant-gardists include Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky; later modernist composers who do not fall into
248-638: Is facilitated by mechanically produced art-products of mediocre quality displacing art of quality workmanship; thus, the profitability of art-as-commodity determines its artistic value. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord said that the financial, commercial, and economic co-optation of the avant-garde into a commodity produced by neoliberal capitalism makes doubtful that avant-garde artists will remain culturally and intellectually relevant to their societies for preferring profit to cultural change and political progress. In The Theory-Death of
279-546: Is not reducible to a kitsch style or reactionary orientation, but can instead be used to refer to artists who engage with the legacy of the avant-garde while maintaining an awareness that doing so is in some sense anachronistic. The critic Charles Altieri argues that avant-garde and arrière-garde are interdependent: "where there is an avant-garde, there must be an arrière-garde ." Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of music working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term
310-682: Is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula for the Legendre polynomials , and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters . Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux . His family was of Portuguese-Jewish descent. He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics on 28 June 1815 by the University of Paris . His dissertation contains
341-615: Is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether. By this definition, some avant-garde composers of the 20th century include Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Strauss (in his earliest work), Charles Ives , Igor Stravinsky , Anton Webern , Edgard Varèse , Alban Berg , George Antheil (in his earliest works only), Henry Cowell (in his earliest works), Harry Partch , John Cage , Iannis Xenakis , Morton Feldman , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Pauline Oliveros , Philip Glass , Meredith Monk , Laurie Anderson , and Diamanda Galás . There
SECTION 10
#1732797605465372-459: The 2013 film Mama . Avant-garde In the arts and literature , the term avant-garde (from French meaning ' advance guard ' or ' vanguard ' ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art , and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies
403-522: The American Language poets (1960s–1970s). The French military term avant-garde (advanced guard) identified a reconnaissance unit who scouted the terrain ahead of the main force of the army. In 19th-century French politics, the term avant-garde (vanguard) identified Left-wing political reformists who agitated for radical political change in French society. In the mid-19th century, as
434-497: The Avant-Garde ( Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia , 1962), the academic Renato Poggioli provides an early analysis of the avant-garde as art and as artistic movement. Surveying the historical and social, psychological and philosophical aspects of artistic vanguardism, Poggioli's examples of avant-garde art, poetry, and music, show that avant-garde artists share some values and ideals as contemporary bohemians . In Theory of
465-473: The Avant-Garde ( Theorie der Avantgarde , 1974), the literary critic Peter Bürger looks at The Establishment 's embrace of socially critical works of art as capitalist co-optation of the artists and the genre of avant-garde art, because "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work [of art]". In Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2000), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh argues for
496-697: The Avant-Garde (1991), Paul Mann said that the avant-garde are economically integral to the contemporary institutions of the Establishment, specifically as part of the culture industry . Noting the conceptual shift, theoreticians, such as Matei Calinescu , in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), said that Western culture entered
527-458: The artistic vanguard oppose high culture and reject the artifice of mass culture , because the avant-garde functionally oppose the dumbing down of society — be it with low culture or with high culture . That in a capitalist society each medium of mass communication is a factory producing artworks, and is not a legitimate artistic medium; therefore, the products of mass culture are kitsch , simulations and simulacra of Art. Walter Benjamin in
558-472: The artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In
589-490: The avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms , such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries. In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of
620-554: The avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus , Happenings , and Neo-Dada . Brutalist architecture was greatly influenced by an avant-garde movement. Olinde Rodrigues Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (6 October 1795 – 17 December 1851), more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues , was a French banker, mathematician , and social reformer . In mathematics Rodrigues
651-505: The brutal Martok, but refuses to reveal Ramu's whereabouts. Martok proceeds to murder the Queen. When they finally meet, Naja attempts to kill her sister with a spear, but plunges to her own death instead. The evil Martok insists that Tollea perform a forbidden cobra dance, whereupon the island's volcano begins to violently erupt. It ceases when Martok is killed by Hava. When Ramu is about to return home, Tollea asks him to remain by her side and help her rule Cobra Island. Universal announced
SECTION 20
#1732797605465682-416: The category of avant-gardists include Elliott Carter , Milton Babbitt , György Ligeti , Witold Lutosławski , and Luciano Berio , since "their modernism was not conceived for the purpose of goading an audience." The 1960s saw a wave of free and avant-garde music in jazz genre, embodied by artists such as Ornette Coleman , Sun Ra , Albert Ayler , Archie Shepp , John Coltrane and Miles Davis . In
713-479: The comic strips." He also wrote that Cobra Island "is ruled by a viperous doll who snake-dances in the sacred temple, surrounded by a bevy of night-gowned toots," that "Miss Montez plays dual roles — those of the good twin and the bad twin — without a trace of distinction between," and that the film "is better than the funny papers, on which it was obviously based." Writing in AllMovie , critic Hans Wollstein described
744-416: The cultural values of contemporary bourgeois society . In the U.S. of the 1960s, the post–WWII changes to American culture and society allowed avant-garde artists to produce works of art that addressed the matters of the day, usually in political and sociologic opposition to the cultural conformity inherent to popular culture and to consumerism as a way of life and as a worldview . In The Theory of
775-514: The essay " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1939) and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) said that the artifice of mass culture voids the artistic value (the aura ) of a work of art. That the capitalist culture industry (publishing and music, radio and cinema, etc.) continually produces artificial culture for mass consumption, which
806-529: The essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues 's political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to "serve as [the] avant-garde" of the people, because "the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way" to realise social, political, and economic reforms. In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of
837-568: The film as "the quintessential romantic Montez-John Hall melodrama," "Hollywood escapism at its zenith," and "a rather choice slice of cinematic ham." A description of the film at Turner Classic Movies notes that "the absurdity of the plot of Cobra Woman was a source of creative inspiration for such diverse individuals as theatrical producer Charles Ludlam of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and novelist Gore Vidal . Universal's theatrical release poster can be seen in
868-508: The film in June 1942 starring Montez, Hall, and Sabu, even before shooting had begun on their production of Arabian Nights . It was meant to follow that film but was pre-empted by White Savage . Filming took place in May 1943. Siodmak later called the film "silly but fun...Montez couldn't act from here to there but she was a great personality and completely believed in her roles: if she was playing
899-535: The mediocrity of mass culture , which political disconnection transformed being an artist into "a profession, one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing [the profession of being an artist]." Avant-garde is frequently defined in contrast to arrière-garde , which in its original military sense refers to a rearguard force that protects the advance-guard. The term was less frequently used than "avant-garde" in 20th-century art criticism. The art historians Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris argue that arrière-garde
930-475: The result now called Rodrigues' formula . After graduation, Rodrigues became a banker. A close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon , Rodrigues continued, after Saint-Simon's death in 1825, to champion the older man's socialist ideals, a school of thought that came to be known as Saint-Simonianism . During this period, Rodrigues published writings on politics, social reform, and banking. In 1840, he published
961-593: The rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". Post-punk artists from the late 1970s rejected traditional rock sensibilities in favor of an avant-garde aesthetic. Whereas the avant-garde has a significant history in 20th-century music, it is more pronounced in theatre and performance art, and often in conjunction with music and sound design innovations, as well as developments in visual media design. There are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to