Few artists have had a greater influence on the history of experimental cinema, queer cinema, and performance art than Jack Smith. Caustically funny, politically subversive, and defiantly intolerant of intolerance, Smith provoked police raids and censorial judges with his 1963 film Flaming Creatures. He was an antic performer who played to the cheap seats, flamboyantly and tragicomically overwrought in the manner of Hollywood stars like Theda Bara, Maria Montez, Gloria Swanson, and Dorothy Lamour. His style of camp blended polymorphous sexuality, hothouse fantasy, and social satire.
But even as he reveled in creating kitschy tableaux of odalisques, vamps, and dumpster divers, Smith’s fever dreams and orgiastic burlesques could not have been more heartfelt, poignant, or daring. Whether filming amid the scrap heaps of the future Lincoln Center or the flotsam and jetsam of his own downtown New York City apartments, Smith made beauty out of the impoverished and the forsaken, the tawdry and the spurned.
Organized by Josh Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, with Danielle Johnson, former Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film.
