It used to be that screenings of Jack Smith’s films were raided by New York’s vice squad and they were all but impossible to see for many years. Films include Flaming Creatures, Scotch Tape, and Normal Love. They vary from the haunting and dreamlike to the comically irreverent-yet all are fabulously beautiful. Film profile for Jack Smith, Director and actor, born 14 November 1932. Many of his images capture moments from his films, or portraits of the cast and friends. Smith was also a photographer whose beautiful prints have rarely been seen outside of a gallery exhibition. Irreverent in tone and delirious in effect, Smiths films. John Waters hailed Smith as “the only true underground filmmaker.” Susan Sontag described the controversial and allegedly pornographic Flaming Creatures as “a rare modern work of art about joy and innocence.” While Andy Warhol said Smith was the only filmmaker he would steal from. Legendary American artist, filmmaker and actor Jack Smith (19321989), described by Andy.
In conjunction with the exhibition Jack Smith: Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis on view through September 9, Artists Space and Metrograph present a six-program retrospective of Jack Smith’s visionary films, including Flaming Creatures (1962-63), Normal Love (1963-64), and. the film ken kelman reports that Smith told him that the female object. Artists Space Jack Smith Film Retrospective Screenings September 8 10, 2018 Metrograph 7 Ludlow Street New York NY 10002.
As a filmmaker he seemed often careless about the fate of his movies, but their success and influence was far greater than the size of the audience that saw them. In affirming the importance of the nonexistent, Jack Smith insists on the. Smith peopled his camp B-movie melodramas with friends, and often shot them on out-of-date film stock.
Sometimes the audio is frustratingly elliptical, sometimes it’s instructive: At one point, Smith informs would-be creators that “yes, there is such a thing as rules of art,” and that making work “really has to be boring” as we hear this, we watch Smith tediously comb through boxes of photographic slides.Jack Smith was a visionary performance artist and underground filmmaker who produced and directed a series of no-budget films during the 1950s and 1960s, the most famous being Flaming Creatures and Normal Love both from 1963. “I perceived it was not a co-op,” he says of the organization, and that it didn’t have his best interests at heart - never mind that Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for showing Flaming Creatures, and that he would continue to promote Smith’s work long after his death.Įlsewhere, we get bits of “live film” performances, scenes of glitter-painted drag, and an ecstatic montage of a woman being pushed on a swing. Referring to its founder Jonas Mekas as “Uncle Fishhook,” he suggests that artists were exploited there. Far from an introduction to Smith’s oeuvre (Mary Jordan did that in 2006’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis), this eccentric presentation of rare materials aims at the artist’s most devoted followers, and will thrive exclusively in academic and art-cinema venues.Ĭlips of Flaming Creatures, for instance, play in the background while Smith describes his disillusionment with the beloved avant-garde institution Anthology Film Archives. In “a film essay concerning the works of Jack Smith,” Jerry Tartaglia produces a similarly unsellable artifact with Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith. Cult filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith, whose most famous work is 1963’s Flaming Creatures, didn’t like the term “underground.” But his work could hardly have been more subterranean - featuring elements that would draw accusations of pornography, crafting no-budget trash manifestations of a nascent queer aesthetic, hosting art events that couldn’t hope to make money.