Five films by Jack Smith

Sunday October 2/18:30 Oct 5 at 20.00, Filmhuset

Jack Smith is one of the most subversive artists in American experimental film history. His performative works express a wayward and radical cinephilia that formed the basis of his engagement with beauty – the physical as well as the cinematographic.

When the French New Wave films’ rewriting of film history by means of the auteur theory spread in the United States, there was already a parallel movement in New York. The movement was also born out of an impulse to highlight previously neglected expressions of film history, and Jack Smith was one of its main representatives. For Smith, however, it was not a question of highlighting artists neglected in Hollywood cinema, but instead of visually excessive B-movies with monsters, creative costumes and exotic fantasy worlds, whether made by auteurs or not:

“Judy Canova flix (I don’t even remember the names), I Walked with a Zombie, White Zombie, Hollywood Hotel, all Montez flix, most Dorothy Lamour sarong flix, a gem called Night Monster, Cat & the Canary, The Pirate, Maureen O’Hara Spanish Galleon flix (all Spanish Galleon flix anyway), all Busby Berkeley flix, Flower Thief, all musicals that had production numbers, especially Rio de Janeiro prod. nos., all Marx Bros.” (1)

Author Susan Sontag described Smith’s work as a ”modern ’campy’ way of appreciating popular culture”, (2) and film scholar Marc Siegel has described it as that these films

“… inspired Smith to recognize the power of individual conviction to transform ordinary objects, lines of dialogue, garbage and paper mache sets into the elements of a magical fantasy world. ’Trash’, as he put in the Montez essay, ’is the material of creators’.” (3)

Based on eclectic preferences, Jack Smith worked with both performance and film, and his unbridled visual and audio language paved the way for some of the most experimental – and challenging – works of queer cinema. A few years ago, his Flaming Creatures (1963) was screened with the Maria Montez film Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (1944) – a screening that is followed up here with some of Smith’s all-around groundbreaking films.

(1) Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” i Film Culture nr. 27 (1962).
(2) Susan Sontag, ”Notes on Camp”, i Against Interpretation (1966).
(3) Marc Siegel, “Jack Smith is an Ordinary Name” i La Furia Umana nr. 27 (2016).

Films in program

Respectable Creatures

Overstimulated

Jungle Island

Song for Rent

I Was a Male Yvonne Decarlo