Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis (2006) +

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.22.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

An enthralling homage to one of the most notorious and legendary experimental filmmakers cum performance artists of the twentieth century. Mary Jordan's film is presented as a documentary portrait and it's an apt tagline. This film's primary project, it seems, is to introduce the extraordinary Jack Smith as a person and as an artist to a whole bunch of people (not unlike myself) who mostly know him (if they know him at all) because he made a film called "Flaming Creatures." The film neither defends nor critiques Jack Smith but, instead, through a captivating meld of experimental montage and deftly integrated talking heads develops a thorough and at time discomfiting portrait of Jack Smith's extraordinariness. Indeed, the main "takeaway" from this film is a clear appreciation of just how influential Smith was on more known figures and movements (most notably Warhol, Cindy Sherman, John Waters, etcetera). Smith did it all and, in most cases, did it first. Yet the film does a nice job of attending to Jack Smith as "self-absorbed ass" as well. I came away with nothing but admiration and affection for Smith, and feel I have a much deeper appreciation of the genealogy of some of my most treasured late 20th century innovators (Waters and Charles Ludlam among them) but I'm also clear that, at some point, Jack Smith took that fateful left turn to Crackpotville. (At some points, I was a bit overwhelmed by just how much he reminded me of one of my dearest friends who, like Smith, is living in squalor in great mistrust of the way that the art world works.) But this film offers glimpses to rarely seen bits of the Jack Smith archive and gathers an exciting assemblage of his surviving collaborators. Several key themes: I love hearing Smith talk about the "baroque" -- which, to my ears, sounds like a mix of postmodern bricolage cut with DIY punk aesthetic, all avant la lettre; it's a great reminder of the art aspiration of the repurposing aesthetic. I'm also struck by Jack Smith the performance artist--living life as performance but also as emphasizing the creation of the work as the source of its meaning, in an almost Pollockian way. The tragedy, of course, comes in Smith's concomitant hostility to consumer capitalism and thus his refusal to "finish" any work, as an activist/artistic refusal of permitting himself and his work to become products. One talking head considers this as a signal of Smith's artistic purity. I don't know that I'd take it there, but it does signal some of the core precepts of what becomes "performance" in performance studies and I can see just how significant Jack Smith was and is as a (tacit) influence on subsequent generations. For example, I will now never think of Divine being raped by the lobster without contemplating the lobster as a symbol of captialism in a Jack Smith sense. As a film, Mary Jordan's work amplifies the formal and cultural work done by Smith's stuff in a way that seems to be both very respectful and deeply honest. This is a "warts and all" portrait and it's power -- both as a story and as a cinematic experience -- derives from that. An utterly captivating portrait of an artist who's influence we feel nearly every day but who's name goes largely unmentioned.