Fem filmer av Jack Smith på Cinemateket i Stockholm:

Overstimulated / Respectable Creatures / Jungle Island / Song for Rent / I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo

Jack Smith är en av den amerikanska experimentfilmhistoriens mest subversiva konstnärer. Utifrån eklektiska preferenser arbetade Jack Smith med både performance och film, och hans otyglade bild- och ljudspråk banade väg för några av experiment – och queerfilmens mest utmanande verk.
/ Stefan Ramstedt, Cinemateket (Texten i sin helhet finns här)

Mer info om filmerna:
1950-1970, USA, 1 tim 22 min, engelska, utan text, 16 mm, bildformat: 1.33:1, tillåtna från 15 år. Visningsmaterial från Lightcone.

Overstimulated – (1959, 5 min, Black & White, Silent, Original format: 16mm)
Shot in black and white in Smith’s Lower East Side apartment (the location for the movie that, as edited by Ken Jacobs, would become Blonde Cobra), Overstimulated features Bob Fleischner and Jerry Sims – a sometime Smith model, also prominent in Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death – wearing long, filmy dresses and jumping up and down in front of a flickering TV set. The camera work is scarcely less frantic; made after Scotch Tape, Smith’s second film likely dates from late 1959, before Smith and Fleischner had their falling out. In the aftermath of Flaming Creatures’ success, Jonas Mekas paid the cost of printing for Overstimulated , which may have been (briefly) distributed by the Film Makers’ Cooperative before Smith withdrew it, Overstimulated was incorporated in the program Horror and Fantasy at Midnight which subsequently evolved into No President. (J. Hoberman)

Respectable Creatures – (1950-1966, 24 min, Colour, Sound: Separate CD, Original format: 16mm)
Jack Smith’s “live films” might incorporate footage going back to the mid 1950s . Thus, Respectable Creatures intercuts material from Smith’s first movie, Buzzards Over Bagdad , with scenes shot over a decade later during carnival in Rio de Janeiro, and scenes from Normal Love, including an alternate version of The Yellow Sequence. The extant footage of the 16mm film which Smith may have begun in the early 1950s while living in Los Angeles and was apparently still shooting when he first met Ken Jacobs in 1956, suggests a relatively straightforward gloss on the Maria Montez vehicle, The Arabian Nights – specifically drawing upon a scene that involves a harem girl and her lover putting poison in the caliph’s wine. Jacobs regarded Smith’s intentions as devoid of irony – although that was certainly not the case a decade or more later when Smith reassembled the footage, discovered in a film can labeled Respectable Creatures (which, according to Ela Troyano , who assisted Smith in the early ‘80s , was used to ship the still-banned Flamingo Creatures to the Restless Language Film Festival in Genoa, Italy in 1981). A version of this composition, also incorporating material from I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo, was shown in the spring of 1984 at the Millennium in New York under the rubric Normal Fantasy. The posthumous film is accompanied by tapes made by Smith in Brazil. (J. Hoberman)

Jungle Island – (1967, 20 min, Colour, Sound: Separate CD, Original format: 16mm)
Jack Smith’s 1967 program Horror and Fantasy at Midnight featured a number of individual titles – “film clips from the subterranean chambers of Dr. Madman!” – including Reefers of Technicolor Island/Jungle Island, Scrubwoman of Atlantis (both in “Livid Color!!”), Ratdroppings of Uranus, Marshgas of Flatulandia , The Flake of Soot, and Overstimulated . The latter aside, Reefers/Jungle Island is the only one of these found as a stand-alone film – it also received the most press. Jonas Mekas’s Village Voice review cited a movie that “starred a most beautiful marijuana plant, a gorgeous blooming white queen with her crown reaching towards the sky.” At some point, Smith combined this with footage of another queen – Mario Montez – seemingly shot on the beach in Florida. (J. Hoberman)

Song for Rent – (1969, 4 min, Colour, Sound: Separate CD, Original format: 16mm)
During its 1969 showings at the Elgin Theater, No President was preceded by the color short filmed according to Smith’s direction by photographer Don Snyder (who also shot slides during the same session). Smith appeared as his red-wigged , plastic-jawed, alter ego Rose Courtyard, seated in a wheelchair amid the detritus of the Plaster Foundation. The film was accompanied by two rounds of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America”. Dressed in a red satin gown, clutching a bouquet of dead roses, Rose is finally moved to stand up and salute. The film was found in a can labeled “Song for Rent”, title of a 1971 mixed media production in which Smith appeared. (J. Hoberman)

I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo – (1967-1970s, 28 min, Colour, Sound: Separate CD, Original format: 16mm)
Shot mainly during the late ‘60s and edited (or re-edited) a decade or more later, I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo (as the can in which it was discovered was labeled) is one of several films and slide-shows in which Jack Smith presents himself as a mock celebrity. The movie opens with the excerpt from No President originally called Marsh Gas of Flatulandia – several minutes of black and white footage of steam escaping from manholes segues to an interior scene of various creatures emerging from dry ice vapors – then shifts to color to show the filmmaker, clad in a leopard-skin jumpsuit, attended by a nurse as he sits amidst the detritus of the Plaster Foundation (Smith’s duplex loft cum performing space). Smith waits under the visible movie lights, drumming his fingers. A fan presents him with a black-and-white glamour shot (Smith in profile, posed with a sinuously curved dagger) to autograph as the Warhol superstar Ondine , dressed entirely in black leather, snaps his picture. Violence erupts as the nurse takes out a whip to discipline the star’s fans. When a female creature pulls out the same dagger depicted in the glamour shot, Smith jumps up and shakes the weapon from her hand. The action is post-scripted with footage of a steam shovel patrolling the rubble where a 14th Street movie palace stood. (J. Hoberman)

Fem filmer av Jack Smith ingår i temat
Närbilder hösten 2022 – Kompletteringar, förlängningar och motsägelser – av Cinemateket.

Visningen initierades och inleds av Anna Linder, konstnärlig ledare för SAQMI och genomförs i samarbete med Cinema Queer. Filmprogrammet har kuraterats av Stefan Ramstedt.