KOBELKOFF, a curio from 1900, poised on the knife-edge between celebrating the triumph over adversity and pressing its nose against the glass to drool at the sight of malformity and difference. Asides from questions like “But is it art?” and the more urgent “Who would win in a fight between Kobelkoff and Prince Randian from FREAKS?” I’ll give the (nameless) filmmakers the benefit of the doubt here.
Not an experienced actor, Prince Randian (Prince of where?) is a little quick with his single line of dialogue, which is consequently hard to decipher. The DVD subtitles give it as “Say, can you do anything with your eyebrow?” which is a GREAT line, possibly the greatest and most obscure sentence since the last words of Dutch Schultz. (If you watch FREAKS with the subs on you get a lot of fringe benefits, heavily-accented line readings suddenly explicated, lines you didn’t even realise you hadn’t understood…)
While enumerating the limbless, we should pause to resembled the character of the war hero in SATYRICON — Fellini apparently instructed his assistant to find him “the most crippled cripple he could get.” (All this via John Baxter’s chatty, somewhat middlebrow biography). When Federico saw the living torso who’d been sourced for the role, he congratulated his underling: “I didn’t think you’d go that far.”
“I will go a long way to see something I haven’t seen before,” says Clive Barker, and I agree with him, but that does make the world of the cinema a short step from that of the tent show. I guess it always was. So I don’t require total scrupulousness from filmmakers who deal with or exploit disability, I’ll settle for some measure of complexity, conflicted response, or even the childlike wonder of a Fellini or a Jodorowsky at times.
shadowplay 