Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

Directed by Mary Jordan

Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker who died in 1989, survives in the Aaliyah music video, “We Need a Resolution”, that showed the pretty young R&B singer entwined with a huge boa constrictor. Exotic, contradictory, even a bit off-putting, it was a Jack Smith blend of desire and debasement. The image of a pop idol voluptuary in the throes of hyperbolic passion seemed bizarre for hip-hop, but it was derived from the mixture of provocative outrage and joyful perversity that Smith formalized in his movies, Normal Love and Flaming Creatures. Smith called such imaginings “baroque art” (based on his infatuation with B-movie siren Maria Montez), and they became part of contemporary art vocabulary (appropriated by Federico Fellini, Derek Jarman, as well as hip-hop video director Paul Hunter). Smith’s idiosyncratic personal visions infiltrated the mainstream while the relatively obscure artist himself languished in willful bitterness.

Mary Jordan intends to provide a resolution for the frustrations of Smith’s life and his unfair career legacy in her film, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (showing at Film Forum). Described by Jordan as a “documentary portrait,” the film depicts Smith—and the creative utopia he dreamed of as “Atlantis”—as an isolated part of New York’s grant-based, avant-garde art world. Jordan unzips the myth of cultural pioneering. Behind the legend of the rebellious 1960s, a more fecund period than today, she finds the hard fact that art reputations are maintained by business relationships, hustling and competition— focusing on Smith’s rivalry with his more shrewd and organized contemporaries, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas.

A recording survives of Smith bawling, “I always thought people would see this and have pity on me and give me a little support—they didn’t!” His light yet hectoring voice, like David Byrne in yelping mode, is the sound of New York underground anxiety; it’s part of what inspires Jordan’s feeling for an artist who was best appreciated only in retrospect. Jordan’s affection and inquiry are bound up with emulating Smith’s own ramshackle, American-Dalí style. She constructs interviews and clips to be “lambent, wonderful, surging, frolicking.” If a coherent profile of Smith with his handsome cheekbones, heavy brow, prominent nose and camp-savant manner never quite emerges, Jordan ultimately sheds light on the aspect of bohemian careerism at which naive, rancorous Smith failed. It dominates today’s art world; he might have lasted longer as a pop dilettante of the David Byrne, Laurie Anderson survivor school.

In a sobering late interview, Smith explained himself to Jordan “That’s my fault. I was never organized nearly enough. I didn’t know those things. I was just squeezing art of myself, neglected my health and didn’t write those letters, didn’t do any of that stuff. [If I had,] I wouldn’t have been the same person.” For Jordan, sympathy is resolution.