How does a film-maker whose work, in his heyday, conjoured references to Fellini, DeMille, Anger, Goya, Bergman, Buñuel, Jodorowsky, Truffaut – who was, in the words of Rolling Stone, “a kind of one-man American New Wave” – remain so unheralded in the 21st Century? Fredric Hobbs directed four features films – Troika (1969), Roseland (1971), Alabama’s Ghost (1973) and Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), only one of which is readily available to audiences in 2022. And if it wasn’t for that one, Godmonster – first championed on DVD by Something Weird Video and, most recently, via a 4K preservation by the American Genre Film Archive, as well as one holy tome (Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA) – we might not know of Hobbs the film-maker at all.
How to describe Troika, then? Rolling Stone: “Troika is a fable about creative frustration liberated through sex in a momentous crescendo of excruciating intensity.” It’s “a film about creation,” according to Thrower, “a three-part avant-garde surrealistic comedy with polemical asides and documentary footage.” A conteporaneous New York Times review described the film’s third movement (Hobbs privately identified the three parts of Troika as The Chef, Alma Mater and The Blue People), as “Halloween on a Martian landscape.”
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