Jack Smith

Jack
Smith

Few artists can be said to have had a greater influence on the history of experimental cinema, queer cinema, and performance art than Jack Smith (1932–1989). - Josh Siegel

Films

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    Normal Love
    Experimental

    Normal Love
    Jack Smith

    color, sound on CD, 120 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Respectable Creatures
    Experimental

    Respectable Creatures
    Jack Smith

    color, sound on CD, 24 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • Arts / Artists
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Scotch Tape
    Experimental

    Scotch Tape
    Jack Smith

    16mm, color, sound, 3 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Overstimulated
    Experimental

    Overstimulated
    Jack Smith

    16mm, black and white, silent, 3 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Flaming Creatures
    Experimental

    Flaming Creatures
    Jack Smith

    16mm, black and white, sound, 43 min
    Rental formats: 16mm, Digital file
    • Body
    • Erotic
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Yellow Sequence
    Experimental

    Yellow Sequence
    Jack Smith

    color, sound on CD, 15 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • Arts / Artists
    • LGBT / Queer
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    I Was A Male Yvonne De Carlo
    Experimental

    I Was A Male Yvonne De Carlo
    Jack Smith

    16mm, black and white, sound on CD, 28 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • Body
    • LGBT / Queer
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    Jungle Island
    Experimental

    Jungle Island
    Jack Smith

    color, sound on CD, 15 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • Arts / Artists
    • LGBT / Queer
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    No President
    Experimental

    No President
    Jack Smith

    black and white, sound on CD, 45 min
    Rental format: 16mm
    • Political / Social Activism
    • Arts / Artists
    • LGBT / Queer

Biography

Few artists can be said to have had a greater influence on the history of experimental cinema, queer cinema, and performance art than Jack Smith (1932–1989). Smith was an antic performer who played to the cheap seats, flamboyantly and tragicomically overwrought in the manner of Theda Bara, Maria Montez, Gloria Swanson, and Dorothy Lamour.

His style of camp blended Hollywood orientalism, burlesque, kitsch, polymorphous sexuality, and social satire. Caustically funny, politically trenchant, and defiantly intolerant of intolerance, he provoked police raids and censorial judges, and created a beautiful, haunting, poignant, outrageous, orgiastic body of work that transformed the artistic landscape of the New York underground—a culture also being shaped in profoundly radical ways by Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, the Kuchars, Jonas Mekas, the Velvet Underground, Charles Ludlam, and Susan Sontag—as well as inspiring a subsequent generation of artists, including Richard Foreman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christophe Schlingensief, Laurie Anderson, Derek Jarman, Nan Goldin, Robert Wilson Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Pipilotti Rist, Vaginal Davis, Cindy Sherman, Guy Maddin, Ryan Trecartin, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, The Cockettes, John Bock, and countless others.

Archive

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    Filmmakers' Cinematheque Poster

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    FMC films on tour in Poland