Happy Birthday, Jack Smith! Born today in 1932, this American photographer, actor, filmmaker and pioneer of underground cinema is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art.
He has been critically recognized as a master photographer, though his photographic works are rare and remain largely unknown.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Smith was later raised in Texas. Raised on Hollywood kitsch, this included the imagery of 1940s movie monsters.
This especially included his patron saint, the Dominican motion picture actress Maria Montez (also known as The Queen of Technicolor). Due to the inspiration of Montez, Smith had built an altar and prayed to her.
Always a good talker, Smith insisted on Montez's importance as an actress to any and all who would listen (and there were many).
Smith had called her "the Holy One" and "the Miraculous One."
After a screening of one of her films, he told a friend, "The Miraculous One was raging and flaming. Those are the standards for art."
It was there in Texas where Smith made his first film. This was the eight-minute 1951 American color short film 'Buzzards Over Baghdad'. Two years later, Smith moved to New York.
One decade later, Smith directed the most famous (or infamous) of his productions.
This was in editing, shooting, writing, producing and directing the forty-two-minute 1963 American black and white experimental drama film 'Flaming Creatures'.
The film contains scenes of people who do things that are considered bizarre, strange and taboo, including performers dressed in elaborate drag for several disconnected scenes. It also includes a lengthy lipstick commercial, an orgy, and an earthquake.
'Flaming Creatures' is a satire of Hollywood B-movies and is also a tribute to Montez, who had starred in many such productions. At the time, she was a Warhol superstar.
On a meager budget of $300, 'Flaming Creatures' was shot on outdated fifteen-year-old army surplus film stock (which gives the film a washed-out, otherworldly feel). Most of its characters are sexually ambiguous, including transvestites, intersex, and drag performers.
'Flaming Creatures' is largely non-narrative, and its action is often interrupted by cutaways to close-ups of body parts, including male and female genitalia.
However, authorities considered some scenes to be pornographic. Copies of 'Flaming Creatures' were quickly confiscated at its New York City premiere, as it was soon after subsequently banned (technically, it still is to this day).
Later, a policeman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ordered the projector stopped while the film was being shown to students at the University of Michigan. He then confiscated the print.
Still later, four student officers of the UM Cinema Guild were arrested on obscenity charges.
'Flaming Creatures' was used by American military officer, attorney, judge, politician and then-United States senator Strom Thurmond to prevent American lawyer and jurist Abe Fortas from becoming Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite not being viewable, 'Flaming Creatures' eventually gained some notoriety when footage was screened during Congressional hearings and the desiccated right-wing. Even Thurmond mentioned it in anti-porn speeches.
The U.S. Supreme Court notably banned 'Flaming Creatures', as "the film is not within the protections of the First Amendment because of its utter lack of social value."
Because of its graphic depiction of sexuality, some venues refused to show 'Flaming Creatures'.
Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs ('Blonde Cobra'), and American painter Florence Karpf (Mekas' wife) were all charged, and the film was ruled to be in violation of New York's obscenity laws.
Mekas, including American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag, mounted a critical defense of 'Flaming Creatures'. Because of this, it later became a cause célèbre for the underground film movement.
'Flaming Creatures' was shot, appropriately enough, on top of a movie theater in the Lower East Side.
Unable to corral the real Montez, Smith settled for American actor Francis Francine. She would later be the drag-queen sheriff of Andy Warhol's ('Vinyl') 1968 American Eastmancolor western/comedy crime drama film 'Lonesome Cowboys', as a stand-in.
In 'Flamimg Creatures', Miss Francine prances around in a brocaded turban, poses, applies lipstick, and eventually succumbs to the cruelties of a transvestite vampire who rises from an Ed Wood-style paper coffin.
However, Smith was more cunning than the cheesy dramatics, "Oriental" music, mock-orgies, and mindless make-up sessions would indicate.
In reformulating his treasured favorites from the catacombs of Hollywood - in this case Montez's Ali Baba - he tosses out all manner of good sense and logic, paving the way for others to do likewise after him.
As arbitrary and formless as the film appears, Smith is in firm control of the frame, creating ravishingly painterly images that lull the viewer into a near-hallucinatory state.
He never used per se the collage technique common to underground film of the time, but the effect is similar through his superimposition of portions of the Ali Baba soundtrack and cheaply alluring period music.
'Flaming Creatures' has elaborate, hilarious dance and orgy sequences and an unforgettable discussion of makeup and penises that ends with Francine asking a question that so many have pondered: "Is there a lipstick that doesn't come off when you suck cock?"
The film ends in an earthquake created in the simplest manner imaginable - by shaking the camera. In Smith's world, even the apocalypse is just a tacky momentary diversion.
Smith himself even described 'Flaming Creatures' as a "comedy set in a haunted movie studio."
Later that same year, Smith wrote and directed the 1963 American experimental film 'Normal Love'.
This was the only work in Smith's oeuvre with an almost conventional length (two hours), and featured multiple underground stars.
Shot in color, 'Normal Love' was also known as 'The Great Patsy Triumph'.
The rest of Smith's productions consists mainly of short films, many never screened in a cinema, but featured in performances and constantly re-edited to fit the stage needs (including 'Normal Love').
Apart from appearing in his own work, Smith also worked as an actor. He played the lead in Jacobs' thirty-three-minute 1963 American black and white experimental short film 'Blonde Cobra' (as Madame Nescience).
In March 1964, police interrupted a screening of 'Flaming Creatures' and seized a print of the film.
Smith later appeared in Warhol's infamous, unfinished lost campy classic. This was the fifty-four-minute 1964 American black and white drama film 'Batman Dracula'.
Smith also later appeared in several theater productions by American experimental theater stage director and playwright Robert Wilson.
By all accounts, Smith was difficult but charismatic, a magical trickster manically involved in all kinds of projects at all times.
Never far from poverty in spite of a few grants here and there, he was gifted in seducing actors and friends to work for free and in "appropriating" materials he needed for his art.
Smith continued to create performance and experimental theatre work until his passing from pneumocystis (an AIDS-related pneumonia) in New York City, New York on September 25, 1989. He was 56.
Smith once stated: “I was knocking myself out to make this stuff. And I always assumed that people would see this and have pity and give me a little support. [shouts] They didn’t!”
Smith's own standards for art let him refashion Montez and the whole ethos of tinny Orientalia, low-budget intrigues.
This was in what he called Universal Studio's "cowhide thongs and cardboard sets" into Dionysian revels that were both wild camp and subtle polemic in upsetting an overflowing apple cart of norms: heterosexuality, narrative, social and sexual and aesthetic repressions.
The world, as seen in Smith's films, is a comic collage of fake history and fake culture, reduced to pathetic backdrops before which his "creatures" - vaguely gendered Frankenstein assemblages of makeup and rags - heroically writhe.
Much of Smith's work is about the importance of style and, specifically, the pose; he practically rubs our noses in the idea that logic and progress and movement are always secondary to experience and stasis and the tableau, as long as it's beautiful.
His films are at once coy and brazen. Their much-vaunted orgies and nudity (which some courts called "hardcore" with nothing in the films to support that) appear sometimes in flashes, where you have to squint to see it.
There may also be a penis or a breast wagging quietly in the corner of a frame, chiefly occupied by a muscular drag queen dressed as an ungainly mermaid.
As serious as he was about his own work, Smith did not view it as inviolate. His view of an ideal world of constant change and pleasure no doubt accounted for his peculiar, perhaps unique, habit of re-editing some of his work while it was being projected.
According to American experimental filmmaker and archivist/restorationist Jerry Tartaglia, Smith developed a lightning-fast technique of removing a take-up reel during projection and resplicing whole sections before they were sucked back onto the other reel and onto the theater screen.
Smith's unique conceits might have remained just another private mythology, relegated to occasional basement screenings for friends, but his theatrical personality assured a far wider reach.
Even Warhol appropriated the concept of "superstar" and fake Hollywood studio from him, and Sontag made a famous defense of 'Flaming Creatures'.
Wilson, along with John Waters ('Pink Flamingos'), American photographer Nancy "Nan" Goldin, and American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director Laurie Anderson are among those who credit Smith's singular vision with inspiring their own art.
Smith was one of the first proponents of the aesthetics which came to be known as 'camp' and 'trash', using no-budget means of production (e.g. using discarded color reversal film stock) to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by Hollywood kitsch, orientalism and, with 'Flaming Creatures', created drag culture as it is currently known.
Smith's style also influenced the film work of Warhol as well as the early work of Waters.
Smith was a trickster second to none, in whose remarks, even the impromptu ones - "O Maria Montez, give socialist answers to a rented world!" - lay treasures of wit and pleasure.
Smith had been active from 1951–1967.
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