Scotch Tape
Flaming Creatures
You’d never imagine this from the mainstream press, but experimental film is on the rise again, as a taste as well as an undertaking–even if it’s often returning in mutated forms like video or in areas of filmmaking where we least expect it. At the Rotterdam International Film Festival three weeks ago, hundreds of Dutch viewers, most of them in their 20s, stormed the largest multiplex in Holland–one of the best-designed facilities I know of, suggesting an unlikely cross between a Borders and a Beaubourg, a mall and an airport–to see work that’s thought to have little or no drawing power in this country. They watched short experimental videos from Berlin, London, and Providence, Rhode Island, at a crowded weekday afternoon program called “City Sounds.” They watched Blue Moon, a charismatic Taiwanese feature by Ko I-cheng whose five reels can be shown in any order (they all feature the same characters and settings, but whether the five plots match up chronologically or as parallel fictional universes–signifying flashbacks, flash-forwards, or variations on a theme–is left to the viewer). They watched several videos by Alexander Sokurov and his most recent feature, Mother and Son. And in a smaller and older Rotterdam multiplex, comparable crowds were turning up for an Ernie Gehr retrospective, Jon Jost’s first video, and experimental documentaries from all over, a few shown with live musical accompaniment. The festival was also screening pictures like Deconstructing Harry and The Ice Storm, but for once these weren’t overpowering the more experimental fare; if anything, the art-house blockbusters seemed relatively marginalized at this event.
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But we should distinguish between traditions of filmmaking and traditions of film viewing, especially when the social functions of films change over time. Starting Thursday, February 26, the Film Center is presenting four separate Jack Smith programs over three consecutive days, with Flaming Creatures and Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra showing all three days. I’ve seen about five of the seven hours in this retrospective at one time or another, and to my mind the films split quite dramatically between those with sound and music and those comprised of silent footage, not because Smith deliberately divvied up his work that way but because its original functions and settings no longer exist.
The idea of brandishing technical imperfection with pride is already present in Scotch Tape, accounting in this case for the film’s very title. Shot in 1959, the film grew out of one of the many shooting sessions organized for Ken Jacobs’s still-unfinished Star Spangled to Death, an epic compilation of found footage interspersed with interludes of Smith’s clowning. On that particular day, Jacobs brought Smith and a couple of his costumed associates, Jerry Sims and Reese Haire, to a demolished building on a stretch of Manhattan’s west side where the Lincoln Center complex now stands, and Smith borrowed Jacobs’s camera to film him and the others dancing among the rusted cables and broken concrete slabs–which in certain shots become more prominent than the people–doing all his editing in-camera. Afterward Smith discovered that a dirty piece of cellophane tape had gotten stuck in the camera gate and wound up getting printed in the upper right corner of every frame; rather than accept this as an encumbrance, he preferred to celebrate its presence in his title. As P. Adams Sitney points out, the tape’s “fixed position offers a formal counterbalance to the play of scales upon which the shot changes are based”–a textbook illustration of what Orson Welles was talking about when he said that a film director is someone who “presides over accidents.”
Smith wrote two major critical-theoretical position papers, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” and the much shorter “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” (meaning von Sternberg); published in Film Culture around the time of Flaming Creatures, they throw a certain amount of light on his sources. (They’ve recently become available again in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, a well-documented collection edited for High Risk Books by Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell.) Both have been called camp manifestos written before camp taste entered the mainstream, but they’re even more relevant as passionate personal declarations that outline some of the psychic determinants behind Smith’s image pool. In her early defense of Flaming Creatures, Sontag rightly termed it more intersexual than homosexual and related it mainly to pop art and “the poetic cinema of shock” rather than camp; other commentators have noted it as a crucial forerunner of many avant-garde theater productions staged by Robert Wilson (such as Deafman’s Glance) and Richard Foreman.
