Part of the New American Cinema group in New York City during the 60s, Jack Smith’s flamboyant aesthetic can be characterized by a mix of baroque exoticism, gaudy costumes, and detritus salvaged from the city streets. Flaming Creatures is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Smith’s deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom.

984MB | 42m 34s | 770×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/A13424EFED2B625/Flaming.Creatures.1963.576p.WEB.AAC.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language:English
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The post Jack Smith – Flaming Creatures (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
By 1965, Jack Smith was exhibiting versions of Normal Love, mixing his soundtracks live and often re-editing the film as it was being shown. After Smith’s death, Jerry Tartaglia prepared this restored 105-minute version, which premiered in 1997. Although shot on backdated color-film stock and paced more languidly than Flaming Creatures, Normal Love again features women and cross-dressed men in an idyll of sexual anarchy. Smith filmed almost entirely outdoors, emphasizing pinks and greens in the scenery, costumes, and props, and combining textural passages with allusions to film icons such as the Mummy and the Werewolf, Maria Montez, and Busby Berkeley. The inspired finale is set atop a massive pink cake (where the dancing Cake Cuties include Andy Warhol).

Cita:
Though Jack Smith never quite completed Normal Love (1963), what he left behind maintains a consistent level of intensity, its weirdly costumed characters cavorting before the camera in role-playing more twisted than the word “drag” could ever convey. Mostly filmed the year Smith’s orgy-comedy Flaming Creatures became a famous obscenity case, Normal Love is a kind of lyrical sequel, replacing the earlier film’s bleached-out black and white with lush color (faded somewhat in this restoration) and its urban claustrophobia with rural locales outside New York City. Over the years Smith showed Normal Love in various versions; the present film was assembled using notes from actual screenings and records he’s known to have played with it. His cast of “creatures,” including Mario Montez and Tiny Tim, perform in a series of disjointed sequences that oscillate between trancelike impersonation and utterly reflexive self-parody: a mermaid in a tub, for example, is larger than life yet totally ridiculous, her tail phonier than the worst B-movie costume. Smith’s gender-fuck visions, more radical than mainstream concepts of drag, conflate dress-up with striptease, ludicrous acting with a sure belief that one can become one’s costume. His visual style is a dense and demented re-creation of von Sternberg, the smallest fashion accessory a radiant surface as camera and character–and character and costume–move in a coordinated ballet at once graceful and spastic.

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/772763C64D34436/Normal_Love_%28Jack_Smith%29%28Long_cut%21_-_106_min%29%28TVRip_-_XviD%29.avi

no pass

The post Jack Smith – Normal Love [Full Cut] (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

IMDB:
User Review

not sure why it’s titled this, but it’s a fanciful and exciting little trip
by Jack Gattanella

Jack Smith was one of the masters of the underground film-making ‘group’ in New York city in the early 60s, and this was one of the few films that Smith finished and screened. While nowhere near the notorious nature of Flaming Creatures or the color-grandeur of Normal Love, Scotch Tape is significant because in a 3-minute stretch of time Smith is able to convey a lot of energy and excitement over some footage that is hard to make out. It looks as those there are figures dancing among garbage or something, moving about, maybe even at 16 frames-per-second, and all done to a super catchy swing tune from the 30s.

This is all its really about, to say the least, but what’s great about it is that Smith leaves it open: you can see what you will in those dark masses of black and white, the figures, the shaky hand-held camera-work (frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if one thought this was the work of a bunch of serial killers hopped up on 10 cups of coffee!) Whatever it is, it’s 3 minutes of pure, unbridled mayhem as only Jack Smith could cook up, and this time with far less actual full-blown sex and transvestitism on the screen. I’d almost say it’s like a Brakhage short, but this would be a disservice to Smith, one of the weirdest and most anarchic artists ever to come out of anything remotely considered “artsy.” Find it if you can (it’s somewhere on the web).

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/B84A60379FBB79F/smith-jack-scotch-tape-1963.avi

no pass

The post Jack Smith – Scotch Tape (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.