Date: 28 October 2006 | Season: London Film Festival 2006 | Tags: London Film Festival
JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
‘The only person I would ever copy. He makes the best movies.’ (Andy Warhol)
Mary Jordan, Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis, USA, 2006, 96 min
Diving headlong into the exotic world of Jack Smith, this is a ravishing celebration of a seminal figure of contemporary art, experimental theatre, fashion, film and photography. A devotee of ‘moldy glamour’, Smith was shooting fanciful tableau vivants in 1957, later naming his ensemble the ‘Superstars of Cinemaroc’ way before Warhol had a Silver Factory. His ethereal masterpiece Flaming Creatures is an epic fantasy, featuring blonde vampires and bohemians cavorting amid a tangle of naked bodies. Fêted by Fellini, but denounced by Playboy for ‘defiling at once both sex and cinema’, the film was became a totem in the battle against censorship. Dismayed and resentful, Smith reacted to this unwanted attention by never completing another film. To become a product was to be embalmed. Returning to the ephemeral medium of performance, he appeared amongst piles of meticulously arranged garbage with Yolanda, a toy penguin with jewel-encrusted brassiere. Utterly opposed to the concept of rented accommodation, Smith railed against ‘landlordism’, transforming his dilapidated apartment into an homage to Babylonian architecture. This documentary opens up Ali Baba’s cave, mixing commentary from friends and enemies with the glistening treasures of Smith’s own creation. An abundance of rare photographs, footage and audio bear testament to his uniquely baroque vision.
Also Screening: Thursday 26 October 2006, at 1:15pm, London NFT2
PROGRAMME NOTES
JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Mary Jordan, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 96 min
In 1964, the year Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity after a New York stage appearance, Jack Smith’s pansexual phantasmagoria Flaming Creatures was busted by the NYPD. It was eventually banned in 22 states and four countries; as late as 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General was impounding prints of the movie.
Documentaries need self-dramatizers, and being a diva was Jack Smith’s art and life. At the start of Mary Jordan’s irresistible documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, the artist’s reedy voice is heard intoning, “Doctor, doctor, tell me, please: Is my brain a germ or a disease?” Late in life, he says of his work: “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. [Now he shouts:] They didn’t!”
Smith was inspired as a kid by the Scheherazade schlock of B-movie queen Maria Montez. As a director, he renamed one of his drag stars Mario Montez and starred him in no-budget avant-garde movies of delirious (and now endearing) Caligulan excess. Both Mario and Jack went to work for Andy Warhol, who called Smith “the only person I would ever copy. He’s just so terrific, and I think he makes the best movies.” Warhol’s Factory and the films that emerged from it – Chelsea Girls and the rest – might not have existed without Smith’s influence. Consider that a curse or a blessing.
With Mephistophelean good looks swathed in leopard-skin couture, Smith was a ready-made icon of the Underground, and an easy magnet for police and politicians. “Moral decay is spreading through our country and our society,” declaimed one bluenose, brandishing a poster for Flaming Creatures – thus giving priceless free publicity to the film he meant to denounce.
What was the big deal? Languid displays of male and female genitals. As one of Smith’s avatars, John Waters, says: “Seeing a limp penis – in an arty way, in a way that was intellectual – was revolutionary. The police came because of it! Imagine, calling the cops because you saw a dick in a movie.” The furor made Smith notorious but not famous. Within a few years of the Flaming Creatures fracas, new and more lurid displays of artistic obscenity were on display without police interruption. Smith kept at his mission for another quarter century, but audiences didn’t always come. Yet he soldiered on – even, one night, when no paying customers showed up for one of his live performances. He did it anyway, all seven hours.
Avant-garde art is hard; dying is easy. In 1991, languishing with a fatal bout of AIDS in a Manhattan hospital, the lifelong kvetch was suddenly buoyant. The longtime starving artist told playwright Ron Tavel, “It’s the best food I’ve had in my life.” His mind has sustenance too: dreams of his eternal movie goddess, Maria (not Mario) Montez. It would be lovely if lots of people saw this documentary about an avant-gardist who loved old Hollywood movies. It might remind them that there are lands beyond today’s blockbusters and timid dramas that are worth visiting and, for an hour and a half, living in.
(Richard Corliss)
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