Program notes for Jack Smith presentation of Flaming Creatures
(9/21/1984)
CARNEGIE INSTITUTE MUSEUM OF ART THEATER
Jack Smith is present to screen a program of his films including FLAMING CREATURES (1963) 45 minutes,
This presentation is co-sponsored with Pittsburgh Film-makers, Inc.
"From the mid-60's on, Jack Smith - best-known as the director of FLAMING CREATURES (1962-63) , a key work in the American avant-garde film - has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influencial performance pieces. Although Smith's theatre, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based 'performance artists' of the mid-1970's. His presentations include the ongoing slide-show which has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work, and a number of individual plays. Both modes are original and important contributions to American art. Smith studied dance with Ruth St. Denis and directing with Lee Strasberg.
"FLAMING CREATURES'use of male and female nudity caused it to be taken to trial. Smith's subsequent films included NORMAL FANTASY (1964) and NO PRESIDENT? (1969), and he appeared in those of Andy Warhol, Ron Rice, George Kuchar, Gregory MarkopolouS and other New York City underground filmmakers. As with Orson Welles in the commercial cinema, Smith-the-actor's strong artistic personality exerted a decisive influence, not only in his own scenes, but often over the entire film. With the decline of an actor-orientated avant-garde cinema,' he increasingly appeared in live performances. These included his own works, the Ridiculous Theatre's BIG HOTEL (1967) and Robert Wilson's LIFE AND TIMES OF SIGMUND FREUD (1971).
"Smith considers his first major theatre piece to be CAPITALISM OF ATLANTIS which was performed twice in November 1965 as part of the 'New Cinema Festival.' The production was briefly described in the VILLAGE VOICE as 'an orgy of costumes, suppressed and open violence, and color (whose center) was a huge red lobster, a masterpiece creation of costume and character."
-- J. Hoberman, from THE DRAMA REVIEW, as quoted in brochure for "THE THEATRE OF JACK SMITH."
"Jack Smith, he is the hidden source of practically everything that's of any interest in the so-called experimental American theater today. Absolutely. And I mean everybody from Wilson to myself to Ludlam to Vaccaro, and many other people, owe a great deal to Jack Smith."
— Richard Foreman, as quoted in brochure for "THE THEATRE OF JACK SMITH."
"Richard Foreman was the first to observe, to the best of my knowledge, a different level of dialectic in every presentation by Smith. His plays, slide shows, and even film screenings, especially works in progress, invariably start late, break down several times, and involve Smith himself rushing out, instructing actors, fixing equipment, and suddenly changing the course of the work, until these activities assume the center of attention and the work which initially attracted the audience seems one prop among others. . . . The cinematic object for Smith loses its absolute integrity and becomes a priviledged part of the dialectical work which is the performance."
--P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (NY: Oxford University Press.
1979), 358.
"Smith peoples his films with 'creatures,' as he calls them, from the dark corners of society. He costumes these creatures in rags of moldy glory, and photographs them with a camera style that is torn between sloth and nervous irritability.
Despite their anarchic appearance, his films are totally controlled with regard to framing and composition, and the mood of each film is usually essayed ahead of time with a series of still photographs. This care is becoming more visible as his later films, such as NORMAL LOVE, become more spectacularly beautiful. Smith's emotional sensibility, however,remains on the other side of ANGST, a smoldering and triumphant madness."
-- Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (NY:Dutton, 1967), 18l.
"Smith's monsters epitomize 'sexual role confusion;' they are androgynous characters for whom sex is, at best, a. secondary characteristic. Jack Smith's personal mythology is far more complex than the thematic sexual role confusion which the Theatre of the Ridiculous used. Smith's creatures are not 'humanized' personalities as are Warhol's lesbians and homosexuals. They are delicate, complicated aesthetic conceptions. In FLAMING CREATURES, they are shot so as to appear almost invisible throughout the film, we see more veils than faces, more truncated bodies than characters. The creatures are visually defined by what they are wearing and how they stand, look, move, not by a 'role' of acting imposed on them but by the ways in which the camera (temporarily or partially) catches and frames them. Their insubstantiality emphasizes their mutability, their transience. Their mythical roots are entangled deep within Jack Smith's imagination. He calls our time 'THE AGE OF THE LOBSTER....an astrological development out of SCORPIO RISING in the Age of Aquarius....' Throughout his work he constantly refers to America as 'the reincarnation of the Lost Continent of Atlantis."
-- Carel Rowe, The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend within the American Avant-Garde (Ann A.rbor:UMI Research Press,
(1982), 47.
"Von Sternberg's movies had to have plots even tho they already had them inherent in the images, What he did was make movies naturally - he lived in a visual world.
The explanations plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. ...
"His expression was of the erotic realm - the neurotic gothic deviated sex - colored world and it was turning inside out of himself and magnificent. You had to use your eyes to know this tho because the sound track babbled inanities - it alledged Dietrich was an honest jewel thief, noble floosie, fallen woman etc. to cover up the
visuals.. In the visuals she was none of those. She was V.S. himself. A flaming
neurotic - nothing more nothing less - no need to know she was rich, poor, innocent, guilty etc. Your eye if you could use it told you more interesting things (facts?)
than those. Dietrich was his visual projection - a brilliant transvestite in a world
of delerious unreal adventures. Thrilled by his/her own movement - by superb taste in light, costumery, textures, movement, suject and camera, subject/camera revealing faces - in fact all revelation but visual revelation."
-- Jack Smith, "Belated Appreciation of V.S."
Film Culture 31 (Winter 1963-64): 4-5.
"FLAMING CREATURES is that rare modern work of art; it is about joy and innocence.
To be sure, this joyousness, this innocence is composed out of themes which are - by ordinary standards - perverse, decadent, at the least highly theatrical and artificial. But this, I think, is precisely how the film comes by its beauty and modernity. FLAMING CREATURES is a lovely speciman of what currently, in one genre, goes by the flippant name of 'Pop art.' Smith's film has the sloppiness, the arbitrariness, the looseness of Pop art. It also has Pop art's gaiety, its ingenuousness, its exhilarating freedom from moralism. One great virtue of the Pop-art movement is the way it blasts through the old imperative about taking a position toward one's subject matter. (Needless to say, I'm not denying that there are certain events
about which it is necessary to take a position. An extreme instance of a work of art dealing with such events is THE DEPUTY. All I'm saying is that there are some elements of life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.) The best works among those that are called Pop art intend, precisely’, that we abandon the old task of always either approving or disapproving of what is depicted in art - or, by extension, experienced in life. (This is why those who dismiss Pop art as a symptom of a new conformism, a cult of acceptance of the artifacts of mass civilization, are being obtuse.) Pop art lets in wonderful and new mixtures of attitude, which would before have seemed contradictions. Thus FLAMING CREATURES is a brilliant spoof of sex and at the same time full of the lyricism of erotic impulse. . . .
"Bosch constructed a strange, aborted, ideal nature against which he situated his nude figures, his'androgynous visions of pain and pleasure. Smith has no literal background (it's hard to tell in the film whether one is indoors or outdoors), but instead the thoroughly artificial and invented landscape of costume, gesture, and music. The myth of intersexuality is played out against a background of banal songs, ads, clothes, dances, and above all, the repertory of fantasy drawn from corny movies. The texture of FLAMING CREATURES is made up of a rich collage of 'camp' lore: a woman in white (a transvestite) with drooping head holding a stalk of lilies; a gaunt woman seen emerging from a coffin, who turns out to be a vampire and, eventually, male; a marvelous Spanish dancer (also a transvestite) with huge dark eyes, black lace mantilla and fan; a tableau from the SHIEK OF ARABY, with reclining men in burnooses and an Arab temptress stolidly exposing one breast; a scene between two women, reclining on flowers and rags, which recalls the dense, crowded texture of the movies in which Sternberg directed Dietrich in the early thirties. The vocabulary of images and textures on which Smith draws includes pre-Raphaelite languidness; Art Nouveau; the great exotica styles of the twenties, the Spanish and the Arab; and the modern 'camp' way of relishing mass culture.
"FLAMING CREATURES is a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world - and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core, epicene. But this type of art has yet to be understood in this country."
-- Susan Sontag, "Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures," in Aqainst Interpretation (NY:Farrar, Straus,&
Giroux, 1966),208-210.
"The following is a description of my film, SINBAD IN THE RENTED WORLD. . . . The basic proposition of SINBAD IN THE RENTED WORLD is that the ancient and Arab is one of the best means we have left now to show us the way out of an ugly, rectangular, machine-dictated architecture. ... I have turned an apartment in an old building, built by Italian workmen, into 'Basra' the Arabjian Mights apartment. Here, art has been put back into architecture, where it belongs,' as in ancient times. ... The shooting script is finished, the apartment is finished (and may be visited), and the Sinbad costumes are finished.
The ruined house of Bagdad remembers its story: Sinbad's birthday celebration, his recital of the voyage he made before his more well-known voyages, when he was still Sinbad the dancing boy. He recalls for his guest's amusement the last night at the 'Oily Moment Cafe' where he danced and the incident with the wallet. Unable to go back to the 'Oily Moment' Sinbad becomes drawn into the spell of the crooked 'Your Big Moment' radio program that comes from glamorous Roach Crust Island. He sails to be in the radio audience. The ship is torn apart in a storm of commercials and the wrekage flung on the shore of a false Lighthouse, a part of the complex of buildings that includes the Pawnshop and the Brassiere Museum from whence is broadcast the 'Your Big Moment' radio program. Sinbad awakens upon shore, thinking vaguely that he might have been Sinbad the Tailor, but isn't sure... He must dive for pearls, finds and keeps a forehead-earring-shaped-pearl, and is cheated out of it by Uncle Pawnshop. Later, after buying a tailor business and sitting up late every night for ten years to make the peacock costume, he investigates the Pawnshop. A crab woman
