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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Mario Montez and Frankie Francine (Frank Di Giovanni), black-and-white shooting sessions, early 1960’s, published in The Beautiful Book, by Jack Smith.
In the mid-’90s, filmmaker Mary Jordan encountered Irving Rosenthal, Beat author, counter-cultural instigator, and founder of the Kaliflower commune, a Bay Area community based on the spiritual and economic principles of England’s Diggers: shared property and labor and the liberation of culture from commercialism. Kaliflower was also a breeding ground for San Francisco’s famous drag performers the Cockettes. Through Rosenthal, Jordan learned of the work of Jack Smith.
Pioneer performance artist, actor, photographer, filmmaker, and Downtown icon, Smith has influenced successive generations ever since his infamous (and widely banned) 1962 film Flaming Creatures first presented audiences with his vision of spectacular, glittery excess and sexual combustion. Smith’s successive productions, for film and unofficial stage, combined towering sets and costumes built out of New York City’s debris, with a performance style of obsessively precise improvisation. He incorporated his films and slides into a theater he called Expanded Cinema. Shows could take hours to start, or were seemingly derailed while Smith painstakingly adjusted the drape of a cloth or the focus of a slide projector. The scripts detailed Smith’s inclination toward Hollywood’s fantastic orientalism, peppered with scabrous humor and radical politics. His aesthetic became known as Camp and Trash, as he recycled discarded film stock and channeled B movie stars––creating glamour from remnants. Smith’s style has proved to be truly inimitable, and since his death in 1989, the vexing question of how to honor his legacy—as well as who his actual heirs are, both legal and artistic—has played out in an ongoing series of squabbles involving some of the most prominent members of New York’s downtown scene.
Jordan stepped into this scene determined to document Smith’s life and work, and the resulting film, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, which opens in April at Film Forum, has itself been caught up in the controversy that has characterized all of Smith’s production.
