Press release for screening of Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith
(8/24/1984)
Carnegie Institute News Release
Contact: Kathleen Butler
Communications Assistant
(412) 622-3328
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
UNDERGROUND FILMMAKER JACK SMITH TO APPEAR AT MUSEUM OF ART
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 24, 1984 ... Actor and filmmaker Jack Smith will make his first Pittsburgh appearance at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute at 8:00 p.m. on Friday evening, September 21. Best known for his appearances in the underground films of avant-garde filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs and George Kuchar, Smith is the director of FLAMING CREATURES (1962-63) which he will present in the Museum of Art Theater along with examples of more recent work. He will also discuss his current work-in-progress, SINBAD IN THE RENTED WORLD. Smith will appear at Pittsburgh Film-Makers, Inc. at 8:00 p.m. on the following evening (Saturday, September 22) to present a similar but different program. His presentations are renowned for their spontaneous and unpredictable quality.
The winner of the Fifth Independent Film Award of the New American Cinema group in 1963, Smith's FLAMING CREATURES has been greeted with acclaim and controversy. It is considered one of the outstanding documents of the independent cinema movement in the United States, but it is also the only underground film ever to have been banned in the state of New York.
The range of erotic activity enacted in FLAMING CREATURES reminded critic Susan Sontag of the gaiety and ingenuousness of Pop art as well as the surreal "androgynous visions" depicted in the paintings of the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch. Sontag described the film as a "rich collage of 'camp' lore" recalling, through its Arab temptresses, Spanish dancers, and vampires, the dense texture of Marlene Dietrich movies from the early 1930s.
Smith's newest project, the story of Sinbad Glick and his struggle
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against the villainous Vampire Lobster, promises to be full of the satirical yet childlike fantasy of earlier works. The filming of SINBAD IN THE RENTED WORLD has not yet begun, but Smith has nearly completed an elaborate set in his cramped New York City apartment and has hand-sewn many exquisite and unusual costumes. In Smith's story, Sinbad triumphs, of course, surviving the fly-swatter attack of the Crab Ogresse, a climactic roach stampede, and the subterfuge of the Vampire Lobster.
Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1932, Smith moved to New York in 1950. He studied dance with Ruth St. Denis and later directing with Lee Strasberg.
He undertook his first film, Buzzards Over Bagdad (never completed), in 1951, then began acting in the films of Ken Jacobs and other filmmakers of the New York underground of the 1960s. He made two other films, Overstimulated (1960) and Scotch Tape (1961), before making FLAMING CREATURES in 1962. Other projects include Normal Love (1963- ), In the Grip of the Lobster Age (1966- ), and a play, "Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis" (1965).
Smith will present FLAMING CREATURES and discuss SINBAD IN THE RENTED WORLD in the Museum of Art Theater on Friday, September 21 at 8:00 p.m. General admission is $3.00; admission for Carnegie Institute members, senior citizens, and students with I.D. is $2.50.
He will make a second appearance at Pittsburgh Film-Makers, Inc.
(205 Oakland Avenue) on Saturday, September 22 at 8:00 p.m.
This program is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Howard Heinz Endowment.
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