Chapter 2 - Clapitalism: Jack Smith

Summary

For Jonathan

Buzzards Over Baghdad; Flaming Creatures; Normal Love; No President; Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis; Clamricals of Clapitalism; Stepladder to Farblonjet; Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool; 10 Million B.C.; Clapitalism of Palmola Christmas Spectacle; Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacle; Hamlet of the Rented World; Sacred Landlordism of Lucky Paradise; Scotch Tape; Horror of the Rented World; Art Crust on Crab Lagoon; How Can Uncle Fishhook Have a Free Bicentennial Zombie Underground?; Brasseries of Atlantis; Brasseries of Uranus; Death of a Pengiun… These are the titles of some of Jack Smith's films and performances. He looked like Errol Flynn and sometimes wanted to be called Sharkbait Starflesh.

Essential milestones in a history of the ecstatic close-up: the close-up that devours the image in The Big Swallow ( James A. Williamson, 1901); the close-ups in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928), which André S. Labarthe writes “are looking for the whole in the middle of the face;” the gaze at the camera in Jean Epstein's L’or des mers (1933), so pioneering and poignant that it went unseen; those in Flaming Creatures ( Jack Smith, 1962)—to the sound of tango, they revived the pleasure present in the image of Béatrice Vitoldi dying on the Odessa steps; those in Normal Love ( Jack Smith, 1964), the pinnacle of color. (Then came Faces [ John Cassavetes, 1968] and the rise of the profane).

In The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (Ron Rice, 1963), Jack Smith performs the same gags as Douglas Fairbanks playing Detective Coke Ennyday in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish ( John Emerson and Tod Browning, 1916), but the barrels of cocaine and giant syringes that look like drawings in Fairbanks’ farcical parody suddenly acquire a third dimension—that of genuine desire.

Jack Smith transformed New York into Baghdad, Maria Montez into a goddess, crepe paper from children's birthday parties into film stock, cinema into a performance and the image into a monument. In the debris of his bedroom and the refuse of American capitalism, he made himself a director of the world so that what he called “the rented world” would consider its indignity.