No President

Like the three accompanying Jack Smith shorts in this programReefers of Technicolor Island (1967), I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo (1970), and Song for Rent (made at some point in the 70s)this 50-minute Smith feature of the late 60s, which has been shown in many different versions, is less a finished work than an arrangement of footage with nonsynchronized musical and voice accompaniment, so you may have trouble telling where one work leaves off and another one begins. While no Flaming Creatures, this is still chock-full of weird and wonderful stuff, and the sound elements, all found material, are often as arresting as the images. Some of the ingredients include Smith in a wheelchair, sporting a red wig, red satin gown, and orange-rimmed sunglasses, as Kate Smith sings God Bless America; lovely black-and-white footage of New York traffic punctuated by jets of steam and exhaust; voluptuous color double-exposures of lagoon and shellfish fantasies; Wendell Willkie addressing the Future Farmers of America and the 1940 Republican Convention; lengthy instructions on how to dance the male part in a tango; staged and costumed fantasies in Smith’s cluttered loft; and a diverse selection of arcane found footage shown without its original sound. Consider it a kind of banana split of the imagination, put together by a blindfolded soda jerk. Read more

Jack Smith Shorts and Jack Smith As Seen By Ken Jacobs

A two-hour program stretching from the 50s to the 70s, most of it films by Ken Jacobs featuring Jack Smith as a performer: in The Death of P’Town: Fragment of a Movie That Never Was (1961) Smith cavorts in a cemetery; in Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice and Little Cobra Dance (both 1957) he cavorts in drag for kids and cops in Tribeca; in Little Stabs at Happiness (1962) he nibbles on a doll and a balloon, the latter while dressed as a harlequin; excerpts from Jacobs’s unfinished magnum opus Star Spangled to Death (1962) feature more kids and some extended play with a Rockefeller-for-governor poster. Of the Jack Smith shorts, only one qualifies as a completed workthe lovely, three-minute color Scotch Tape (1959), a costumed frolic around a demolition site. The othersthe silent, black-and-white Overstimulated (1963); the silent 70s fragment Hot Air Specialists; the tedious, silent, black-and-white mid-60s fragment Wino; and the sound and color Respectable Creatures (1966), featuring everything from banal touristic footage of Rio’s Mardi Gras to scenes from an apparent Maria Montez remakeare at best suggestive fragments, none of them a patch on either Scotch Tape or Smith’s magnificent Flaming Creatures. His finished work is too alive to belong in a museum, but unfortunately most of the other stuff doesn’t look like it could belong anywhere else. Read more