The Cinematic Orgiastic

Revisiting Blonde Cobra in his Village Voice column in 1971, Jonas Mekas called the film, which is centered on Smith’s burlesque performance, “a small masterpiece of form, content, and structure. It says more about contemporary horrors than any other film I know. But it’s all done with [the] lightest of fingers, in shooting, in acting, in editing, and in sound.”

Topping off Saturday’s double feature will be Smith’s own Flaming Creatures, the “legendary bisexual, orgiastic, superlow-budget, experimental 1963 masterpiece,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum called it in the Chicago Reader in 1997. In Against Interpretation (1966), Susan Sontag wrote that the “only thing to be regretted about the close-ups of limp penises and bouncing breasts, the shots of masturbation and oral sexuality, in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures is that they make it hard simply to talk about this remarkable film; one has to defend it. But in defending as well as talking about the film, I don’t want to make it seem less outrageous, less shocking than it is.” But Flaming Creatures is “both too full of pathos and too ingenuous to be prurient.”

J. Hoberman, one of Smith’s vital champions and the author of On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc), contributed an essay to Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times, a 1997 collection edited by Edward Leffingwell. “At once primitive and sophisticated,” wrote Hoberman, “hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white on white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished, Flaming Creatures was something new. Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among the great visionaries of American film.”

The series programmers note that Smith “appears as a kind of magic Svengali” in Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1963), a procession of superimpositions depicting people in elaborate costumes swaying, smoking, and dancing in a loft before the laid back festivities shift first to a forest and then to a beach. Jud Yalkut’s Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) is a free-form study of the work of Yayoi Kusama, the artist and environmentalist known for polka dotting canvases, bodies, sculptures, and landscapes.

The program wraps on Sunday evening with Christmas on Earth (1963), directed by the subject of Chuck Smith’s 2019 documentary, Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY Underground. At eighteen, Rubin interned with Mekas, hung out in Warhol’s Factory, and became so close with Allen Ginsberg that she wanted to bear his child. Christmas on Earth is a performance piece in which close-up images of genitalia projected from one reel fill the screen while shots of nude performers projected from a second reel dance inside the larger frame.

Christmas on Earth’s “provocation has nothing to do with titillation,” writes Glenn Kenny in the New York Times. “It is something more simple: a demand to look, to see. That the demand, as blunt as it was, came from a young female artist in a milieu in which women were so frequently subjugated and discouraged is still startling; there’s a sense in which Christmas on Earth can be seen as not having had enough influence.”