Jack Smith

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.Read More »

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Images gathered by Bob Fleischner, sound-film composed by Ken Jacobs. “Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob’s intention to create light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies, actually, two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling-out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed in a fire started when Jack’s cat knocked over a candle; Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of ’59 Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as the fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings of a new entirety. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit.Read More »

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STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH is an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a Beat playfulness.

A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith’s pre-FLAMING CREATURES performance as The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions), celebrating Suffering (rattled impoverished artist Jerry Sims) at the crux of sentient existence, is a visitation of the divine.Read More »