[Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures] presents five unrelated badly filmed sequences a mass rape scene involving two females and many males which lasts for 7 minutes, showing the female

[Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures ] " presents five unrelated badly filmed sequences... a mass rape scene involving two females and many males which lasts for 7 minutes, showing the female pubic area, the male penis, male massaging the female vagina and breasts, cunnilingus, masturbation of the male organ... lesbian activity between two women... homosexual acts between a man dressed as a female, who emerges from a casket, and other males, including masturbation of the visible male organ... homosexuals dancing together and other disconnected erotic activity, such as massaging the female breasts and group sexual activity. " (JS165)

Jack Smith was born on November 14, 1932 in Columbus Ohio to Alvin J. Smith of West Virginia and Chrystine Mayo of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. When he was seven his father died in a fish boating accident off the Gulf Coast after his family had moved to Texas. Jack, his sister and mother lived in trailer parks until his mother remarried in approximately 1945 and the family moved to Wisconsin. When he graduated from high school in Kenosha, his parents gave him his first movie camera (8mm), which was stolen from him shortly thereafter. He left home and moved to Chicago in 1951 and then to Los Angeles in 1952 where he begun making a 16mm film later titled Buzzards Over Baghdad. He moved to New York the following year, in 1953, where he worked as an office boy and took film classes at the City College of New York.

ANDY WARHOL

Andy Warhol knew Jack Smith from the early sixties. Smith was part of a group of Warhol's friends who visited Coney Island several times during the summer of 1963:

Andy Warhol: "We went out to Coney Island a few times that summer (my first time on a rollercoaster), groups of whoever was around - people like Gerard; Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker-actor; Taylor Mead, the underground actor; Wynn Chamberlain, the Magic Realist painter; and Nicky Haslam, a new art director at Vogue. "(POP27)

Warhol bought his first movie camera in 1963 and was influenced greatly by Smith's filmmaking style:

Andy Warhol: "I went out to Old Lyme, Connecticut, a lot of weekends that summer. Wynn Chamberlain was renting the guest house on Eleanor Ward's property and he had gangs of his friends out there the whole time... Jack Smith was filming a lot out there, and I picked something up from him for my own movies - the way he just kept shooting until the actors got bored. People would ask him what the movie was about and he would say things that sounded like a takeoff on the 'mad artist' - 'The appeal of an underground movie is not to the understanding!' He would spend years filming a movie and then he'd edit it for years. The preparations for every shooting were like a party - hours and hours of people putting makeup on and getting into costumes and building sets. One weekend he had everyone making a birthday cake the size of a room as a prop for his movie, Normal Love. The second thing I ever shot with a 16mm camera was a little newsreel of the people out there filming for Jack."(POP32)

Warhol would later use Smith as an actor in his own films, beginning with Batman Dracula in which Smith played the leading role:

Andy Warhol: "Jack played the title role in Dracula... He really got into the part. He claimed that as he put his makeup on, he was slowly transforming himself, letting his soul pass out through his eyes into the mirror and back into him as Dracula, and he had this theory about how everyone was 'vampirical' to a certain extent because they 'made unreasonable demands.' The filming went on for months. I remember one scene where my first female superstar, Naomi Levine, was sleeping on a bed and Jack was out on the balcony. He was supposed to sneak in, go over to the bed, and do some little thing - eat a peach or bite into a grape, I can't remember exactly. David Bourdon was in the scene, and Sam Green, the art dealer and Mario Montez, who'd just come back from a fashion session somewhere, and Gregory Battcock, the art and film critic, who was in a sailor suit; and they were the four human bedposts holding the canopy up over the bed. I was shooting with my Bolex, little three-minute reels, and everyone was going crazy because we had to shoot the scene over and over because Jack just couldn't do it: he was so disoriented that his sense of timing was gone, and he just could not figure out how to get from the balcony over to the bed in three minutes. The farthest he ever got was two feet from the pillow."(POP32)

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04