Troika (1969 film)

Troika is a 1969 American comedy art film written, directed, and produced by artist-turned-filmmaker Carl Fredric Hobbs. It stars Hobbs, Richard Faun, Morgan Upton, Nate Thurmond, Gloria Rossi, and members of the San Francisco Art Institute. Its three parts are built around a fictional account of the director's attempt to gain financing for a film titled "Troika".

Hobbs conceived the outline after working with the filmmakers Ron Bostwick and Robert Blaisdell on the short film Trojan Horse. Inspired, he began to develop a "modern morality play", with a title borrowed from the Russian word for a set of three, embodied by the three overlapping segments. The film was shot in early to mid-1969, in various locations in and around California. The score was composed in a collaborative effort between Hobbs and the editor-co-director Gordon Mueller.

Troika was previewed on October 12, 1969, before officially premiering that year on November 8. It received little attention from film critics, with reviews being mixed to positive. Yet the film became foundational for Hobbs' career and led to his three other films, before he retired from the industry in the late 1970s. The film is largely unavailable to the general public, and has yet to receive a home media release. Hobbs blocked Troika releases on home video as he was unhappy with the final print. In 2022, a copy restored by Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts in collaboration with Hobbs' estate was screened at the Weird Weekend Cult Film Festival.

Plot
Abandons the conventional narrative structure, Troika consists of an introductory story and three parts, each told in differing narrative styles. The film opens with an artist—Fredric Hobbs portraying a fictional version of himself—as he paints on a blank canvas. The scene then transistions to a series of encounters between Hobbs and the Hollywood producer Gordon Goodloins (Richard Faun) as the former attempts to convince him to invest in a proposed art film titled Troika. Goodloins relents and agrees to hear out Hobbs' proposal. Later, the two men meet and discuss the cinematic connections between art and life concerning his vision for the film. Goodloins is unimpressed by the idea and rebuffs him, suggesting that there is no consumer demand for art films. The sequence ends with Goodloins driving off in a limousine as Hobbs angrily chases behind him, shouting, "Up yours, Mr. Goodloins!"

Although the individual sections are not titled in the credits, Hobbs named them in an interview "The Chef", "Alma Mater" and "The Blue People".

The Chef
In this segment, a chef wearing ritualistic face paint, begins crafting an alchemical and culinary brew inside a large vat, into which he throws items such as medals and emblems. Nearby, a homunculus (an artificial human) fashioned out of cloth lies inert as the chef uses pieces of it as ingredients for the concoction. Unsatisfied with the results, the chef introduces a woman, played by Gloria Rossi, covered in painted symbols. They dance before he throws her into the pot. Picking up a rose she had dropped, the chef gazes at it before also tossing it into the vat.

Alma Mater
Presented in documentary style, the second segment depicts a student demonstration in the late 1960s. It opens during a sit-in on a college campus as mounted police gather outside. In the classroom, students covered in white face paint rest on toilet seats and chaise longues while college professors lecture students. After six professors complete their lectures, the frustrated students boo a dunce-capped teacher out of the classroom.

The Blue People
The final segment opens with a train arriving at a grassy landscape. A tall insectoid named Rax (Morgan Upton), exits and travels to a nearby coastal hill. He is later attacked by a feral human (Parra O'Siochain), who leaves him for dead. Rax staggers onto a beach where he collapses and convulses in pain as an orange-colored woman (Rossi) emerges from the ocean, pushing a large sculpture. Seeing Rax, the woman turns towards him, caressing his wounds and eventually masturbating in front of him. The shot cuts to a seemingly rejuvenated Rax entering an icy cave where he meets a seven-foot-tall shaman known as the Attenuated Man (Nate Thurmond). Addressing Rax in distorted Arabic, he induces a vision of a sculpture of three corpse-like beings emerging from the cave's ceiling. Dispersed throughout the segment are clips of a procession of the blue people proceeding across an otherworldly countryside, accompanied by a strange vehicle. At this point, the segment cuts from the cave as Rax, alongside the Attenuated Man, joins the blue people who embrace him as their "savior". The procession escorts Rax in regal splendor as it marches through a ghost town, sparsely populated by blue and purple people, before they arrive at a railway terminal. There Rax bids the group goodbye as he boards the train, and the sequence ends with a shot of Rax as he merges with the sculpture of the three beings.

The film then cuts back to Hobbs as he has completed the painting, unveiled as a grotesque figure of a woman whose extended arm hangs the faces and forms of humanity. Satisfied with the painting, Hobbs exists the frame and the film ends.

Development
Hobbs graduated from Cornell University in 1953 with a bachelors degree in arts, and hoped for a career in the visual arts. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, he produced a series of paintings and sculptures acclaimed for their unique and avant-garde style, which explored environmentalist and spiritualist themes. In 1967, Hobbs collaborated with the filmmakers Ron Bostwick and Robert Blaisdell on a twenty-five minute documentary on his "parade sculpture" Trojan Horse, a metal sculpture bolted over a Chrysler chassis cab. Hobbs financed the project in conjunction with the independent production company Inca Films. During the collaboration, he became fascinated with film as an art form and began to develop the concept for Troika, which he described as a "modern miracle play but not underground".

Troika was developed during the late 1960s arthouse cinematic movement, when visual style often too precedence over lineral narration. While contemporary writers categorized the film as a comedy or art film, it incorporates several different narratives and genres for each segment. Hobbs crafted Troika as a series of increasingly bizarre segments, with the final segment being his favorite. The film expands upon Hobbs' prior works, exploring environmental and spiritual themes through series of images. Religious motifs incorporated into the film were taken from various cultural backgrounds. The dialogue of the Attenuated Man, according to Hobbs, was taken from a portion of the Quran discussing the concept of Universal Brotherhood and modified later in post-production. The procession sequence, where Rax is paraded through the ghost town, was inspired by the traditional religious processionals Hobbs had witnessed during a brief stay in Madrid. Historical events were also used as inspiration for some of the film's sequences. For the "Alma Mater" segment, shot in the narrative style of an expressionist documentary film, Hobbs reportedly took his inspiration from the Kent State riots, which occurred in 1967 and later in April 1969.

Casting
Hobbs mainly cast unknown actors, although some had backgrounds in theatre. He appears as a fictionalized version of himself and as the chef and fantom characters. The San Francisco-based basketball player Nate Thurmond plays the mystical Attenuated Man in the final segment; one writer described the character as a Christ-like figure. Morgan Upton, known for his roles as Wally Henderson in The Candidate (1972) and Mr. Gilfond in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), appears as Rax, the bug-man. Members of the San Francisco Art Institute were hired for several roles, including the blue and purple people and the students in the "Alma Mater" scene. Some of the characters in the marching sequence were student activists from the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Locations and filming
Principal photography began in 1969. The visual artist Gordon Mueller was hired as the editor, and directed the scenes where Hobbs was on camera. The photographer and filmmaker William Heick was brought in as cinematographer; he was a close friend of Hobbs and had worked with the filmmakers Sidney Peterson and Robert Gardner between 1948 and 1953.

The "Chef" sequence was shot inside a local brewery where the crew utilized the vat as a stand-in for the chef's alchemy pot. The "Alma Mater" sequence was shot at the San Francisco Art Institute, with additional filming in Hillsborough, California. The segment's documentary footage was shot during the 1960s Berkeley protests. The ghost town in the final "Blue People" sequence was filmed in Collinsville, California, while the "otherworldly" landscape was shot in the outskirts of a town where a brush fire had recently occurred. Hobbs drilled the student activists portraying the characters in the marching sequence to march in step. Hobbs intended to include a sequence involving Thurmond's character as he runs alongside the skyline. The scene was filmed at Fort Cronkhite, but was abandoned when the military fired Nike missiles during an artillery exercise, ruining the shot.

Hobbs designed the costumes and many of the background paintings and sculptures. Some of these were artworks he had made earlier; notably the Trojan Horse in the processional scene. He and Meuller co-produced the soundtrack, generating sounds that Thrower described as echoing the avant-garde composer La Monte Young.

Release


Troika was first screened on October 12, 1969, and had its official premiere on November 21 in New York. The associated paintings and sculptures were exhibited at the John Bolles Gallery in San Francisco between November 1969 and January 1970. It was screened at the Granada Theater in Wilmington, California on November 28 as a double feature alongside John Perry's short film Dandelion (1969). During its release, some theaters ran advertisements with the caption "Means Three", a translation of the Russian name the title was based on. Troika aired on UK and Canadian television between May and December 1979.

In later years, Hobbs repeatedly blocked its release on home video as he was dissatisfied with the quality of the print and was holding out to finish an edit ultimately never completed. The only known print is stored at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives and includes additional materials. Prints were unobtainable until October 2022 when the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, in collaboration with Hobbs' estate, acquired a copy for restoration efforts by the American Genre Film Archive. The film was screened for the first time in over fifty years at the Weird Weekend Cult Film Festival on October 28, 2022. As of 2024 there have been no further announcements or screenings.

Reception
Contemporary and retrospective reviews of Troika have been largely positive, with critics focusing on its visual style and narrative. In 1969, Howard Thompson of The New York Times praised its unconventional plot, describing it as a "cluttered and disconnected collage of art objects, paintings, live-action fantasy and symbolism". Its surreal and psychedelic visuals were also praised by video retail company Blockbuster Video, in their annual movie guide, described as a "wildly offbeat look at the movie business". The TV Guide echoed this sentiment while also noting that the film would only appeal to viewers who did not mind its unconventional narrative.

The film was generally well-received, especially for its cinematography. However Cue magazine described tit as "grotesque", dismissing its visual style as self-indulgent and "devoid of talent". Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times wrote that the narrative was original but incoherent while the comedic elements were too heavy-handed to be funny. The LA Times dismissed it "obscure and boring". In a 1969 review, Wanda Hale of the Daily News wrote that while the film had artistic merit, it was compromised by "amateurish" production.

Legacy
After the release of Troika, Hobbs developed three additional films in the 1970s. In 1970, Hobbs was approached by pornographic film producer Habib Afif Carouba who offered to fund the director's next film, on the condition that it would be an adult film. The resulting Roseland: A Fable (1970), is a surreal satire on the porn industry. The film gained controversy due to its sexual content, which was considered scandalous for a mainstream film at the time.

In 1973, Hobbs wrote and directed his last two films. Alabama's Ghost (1973) is a horror film that combines the themes and motifs of blaxploitation and vampire films. Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973) continued his exploration of the blaxploitation genre, and was shot in a horror western setting. Both were critical and commercial failures, which, combined with behind-the-scenes conflicts with producers caused Hobbs to grow discontent with the film industry, who later retired from filmmaking.