Discover Top Posts Tagged with #normal love

Popular Recent

NORMAL LOVE (1964) dir. Jack Smith An experimental film project showing the adventures of an ensemble of glamorously dressed monsters. Jack Smith filmed the project in 1963 and began screening the work in pieces in 1964, and although Normal Love was never completed, works by Ron Rice, Andy Warhol, and Tony Conrad grew out of it. After Smith's death, the project was released as a two-hour presentation of his footage. (link in title)

“Jack Smith was a visionary performance artist and underground filmmaker who produced and directed a series of no-budget films during the 1950s and 1960s, the most famous being Flaming Creatures and Normal Love both from 1963. Smith peopled his camp b-movie melodramas with friends and often shot them on out-of-date film stock. As a filmmaker he seemed often careless about the fate of his movies, but their success and influence were far greater than the size of the audience that saw them. John Waters hailed Smith as “the only true underground filmmaker.” Susan Sontag described the controversial and allegedly pornographic Flaming Creatures as “a rare modern work of art; about joy and innocence.” While Andy Warhol said Smith was the only filmmaker he would steal from.”

/ From the article “Flaming Creatures: Icon of Perversion Jack Smith’s Fabulous Photographs” on the Dangerous Minds website, 2014 /

“Born in 1932, Smith came of age with other cultural rebels, but he wasn’t so much unwilling as genuinely unable to conform. What interested him was that state of mind one enters while creating, and that’s what he wanted to show on stage or screen. He didn’t care about finished products. He made the most important avant-garde film in America, then never completed any of his other films. He was known for actually re-editing during screenings. As for performances, no two were alike. He did not believe in acting, which was “hoodwinking,” or in memorizing lines, which rendered one “a mynah bird.””

/ From the article “Flaming Intrigue” by Cynthia Carr in the 2 March 2004 edition of The Village Voice /

Born on this day: pioneering American performance artist, photographer, one of the architects of underground queer cinema and all-round twisted prophet, that flaming creature Jack Smith (14 November 1932 – 18 September 1989). A “filth elder” to be mentioned in the same breath as Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar brothers and James Bidgood and a role model for the ages, Smith is an integral figure in the aesthetic we now call “camp” or “kitsch.”