Actors - Jack Smith

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Jack Smith (film director)

	Actors - Jack Smith

Jack Smith (14 November 1932 in Columbus, Ohio - 25 September 1989 in New York) was a US-American film director and one of the pioneers of American underground cinema.

Smith was one of the first exponents of the aesthetics which came to be known as Camp and Trash, using cheap and spartan means of production (e.g. using discarded color reversal film stock) to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by Hollywood kitsch, orientalism and drag culture. His style influenced the film work of Andy Warhol as well as the early work of John Waters. Smith has also been referenced by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelly, photographer Nan Goldin, musicians Lou Reed and David Byrne, and theatre director Robert Wilson.

The most famous (and arguably the most notorious) of Smith's productions is Flaming Creatures of 1961. The movie is basically a travesty on Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez, who starred in many such productions. However, authorities considered some scenes to be pornographic, copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere and it was subsequently banned (technically, it still is to this day). Despite not being viewable, the movie gained some notoriety when footage was screened during Congressional hearings and right-wing politician Strom Thurmond mentioned it in anti-porn speeches.

Maria Montez starred in Smith's next movie Normal Love, the only work in Smith's oeuvre with an almost conventional length (80 mins.). The rest of his productions consists mainly of short movies, many of them never to be screened in a cinema, but to feature in performances and constantly re-edited to fit the stage needs.

Apart from his own work Smith has also worked as an actor himself: He played the lead in Andy Warhol's unfinished Batman Dracula and appeared in several productions by Robert Wilson.

He also worked as a photographer and founded the Hyperbole Photographic Studio in New York. In 1962 he released The Beautiful Book, a collection of pictures of New York artists, which has recently been rereleased.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jack Smith (film director) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Jack Smith (film director); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay