Penny Arcade was, with film critic J Hoberman, responsible for saving Smith’s archive before its sale to Gladstone Gallery in 2008 and the subsequent restoration of a number of films now shown in Europe for the first time.įor the complete programme go to A Feast for Open Eyes: Jack Smith, supported by The Edwin Fox Foundation, is a collaboration between the ICA Dominic Johnson and LUX, London with special thanks to Gladstone Gallery, New York. New York-based artist, Warhol muse and close friend of Smith, Penny Arcade, performs Denial of Death, a performance inspired by conversations that took place in the last months of Smith’s life prior to his death at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989. The presentation is introduced by Dominic Johnson, author of the forthcoming monograph Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (Manchester University Press) and co-curator of A Feast for Open Eyes. The film is followed by the screening of an interview, recorded exclusively for the ICA this summer, with Jonas Mekas, a founder member of Anthology Film Archives who faced obscenity charges for defending Flaming Creatures in the 1960s.
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The retrospective opens with a screening of Flaming Creatures introduced by Chris Dercon, Director of Tate Modern, who was a close friend of Smith’s. John Zorn, a long-term Smith collaborator selects records to accompany an installation of slides documenting Smith’s work, as he used to in collaboration with Smith in the 1970s and 80s. Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several.
#Jack smith flaming creatures movie
Smith is best known for his contributions to underground cinema but his influence extends across performance art, photography and experimental theatre.Ī Feast for Open Eyes: Jack Smith maps out the breadth of Smith’s practice, from his collaborative film productions to his individual writings, and looks at his legacy in the UK drawing upon a generation of New York artists with whom Smith was closely involved, including Jonas Mekas and Penny Arcade, and younger artists and filmmakers whom he influenced. Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a comedy set in a haunted movie studio. Irreverent in tone and delirious in effect, Smith’s films, such as the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963), are both wildly camp and subtly polemical. Working in New York from the 1950s until his death in 1989, Smith unequivocally resisted and upturned accepted conventions, whether artistic, moral or legal. No one can deny that Flaming Creatures is a difficult film to watch- both in its content and deep artistic meanings, but the spirit of the film is the reason it should be preserved for generations to come.Legendary American artist, filmmaker and actor Jack Smith (1932–1989), described by Andy Warhol as the only person he would ever copy and by John Waters as “the only true underground filmmaker,” is celebrated at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in film, performance and debate with a retrospective of Smith’s work from 7 to 18 September 2011. It as if the world is opening up on Smith's creatures and swallowing them and all their perversions. What is even more remarkable is the "earthquake", caused Smith's shaking camera at the end of the orgy.
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The orgy plays like a tragic meeting the old America with the freshly birthed new morality in America. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. The "creatures", as Smith puts them, engage in a rape-orgy scene of sailors and a transexual. The orgy scene in the film is perhaps the greatest combination of art and film.
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Filmed on top of Smith's New York studio on a basic 16mm camera, Flaming Creatures embodies the true independent spirit of The New American Cinema. On the surface, Flaming Creatures appears to be art at its lowest, but a closer examination of the film proves that Flaming Creatures is not only high art, but a siminal piece of film in the cannon of The New American Cinema. It has ever amount of sexual deviance that made up the New York underground in the 1960's- transexuals, S&M, lines such as "do they make a lipstick that doesn't come off when you s*** c****?", drug use, and a radically innovative orgy scene that plays more like a Greek tragedy than a work of pornography. Jack Smith's 1963 short Flaming Creatures might be one of the most sexual perverse film ever made.