Director Mary Jordan restores the reputation of a major avant garde artist of the 1950s and ’60s in the documentary “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis,” which will be released on DVD Tuesday by Arts Alliance America and Arthouse Films.
Smith gained a lot of notoriety in the early 1960s for the “underground” film “Flaming Creatures” which was banned in many places around the country because of its then shocking — albeit brief — glimpses of female and male nudity.
The picture was a cause celebre in the art world, but Jordan points out how the legal battles took a lot of the wind out of Smith’s sails. He spent much of the rest of his life shooting elaborate sequences for films that were never completed.
Smith became an angry man after pop artist Andy Warhol decided to move into film and swiped many of Smith’s ideas and the notion of underground “superstars” from his one-time friend.
Indeed, many people now know Smith primarily from his strikingly bizarre performances in some of the Warhol movies of the mid to late 1960s.
Jordan assembled a very impressive group of interview subjects for her film, including such downtown New York bohemians as Taylor Mead, Nick Zedd and Jonas Mekas of the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village.
Mekas was a champion of Smith’s films but the artist grew to believe the exhibitor did not pay him as much as he deserved from the screenings.
Smith also became increasingly confrontational with museum curators and other people he felt represented America’s opposition to revolutionary art.
Jordan does a great job of editing scenes from Smith’s unfinished films into haunting montages filled with striking imagery. She also shows us how Federico Fellini borrowed heavily from Smith for two of his most surreal dramas — “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965) and “Fellini Satyricon” (1970).
Smith died from complications of AIDS in 1989 and faded into obscurity, so it is wonderful to have his reputation restored in this excellent documentary.
