Karen Cooper of Film Forum writes:
"For Jack Smith (1932-1989), Atlantis was both the idea of a fantastical utopia and the reality of the Lower East Side apartment in which this prophetic artist staged baroque, improvisational multi-hour one-man theatrical productions, often with a cast of stuffed animals and dolls. An avant-garde photographer, filmmaker, actor, performance artist, and all around 'flaming creature,' Smith has been credited as a major influence by Fellini, Godard and Jarmusch. In Mary Jordan's mesmerizing portrait, he fairly jumps off the screen: a combination mystic, comedian and madman, a protean artist whose vast energy and creativity were undermined (or perversely fed?) by the poverty of his day-to-day life and his paranoid misgivings about just about everything. If there is a heaven for the wonderfully bizarre, Jack Smith resides there, accompanied by his patron saint, Maria Montez."
"Irresistible." - Richard Corliss, Time
"Extraordinary. A triumph!" - Jay Weissberg, Variety
"A lovingly crafted portrait of the artist...an aesthetic manifesto." - Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine
"The only person I would ever try to copy." - Andy Warhol
"I genuflect before Jack Smith, the only true 'underground filmmaker." - John Waters
"Gadfly, trickster, visionary; Jack Smith changed the art world." - Laurie Anderson
A discussion will follow the screening. The event is presented in collaboration with Film Forum, New York's leading nonprofit cinema for independent film premieres and repertory programming. This is one of a number of events arranged as a collaboration between Film Forum and the Philoctetes Center.
Discussants:
Roger Copeland is Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College. He has published articles about film and still photography in The New York Times, The New Republic, Film Comment, and many other publications. His film Camera Obscura won the Festival Award at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in l985. In 1989, Recorder, a video adaptation of his theater piece, The Private Sector, was screened on WNET's Independent Focus series in New York City. He has just completed a feature-length fictional narrative film about the psychological aftermath of 9/11 called The Unrecovered.
Richard Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays both in New York City and abroad. Five of his plays have received OBIE awards as best play of the year, and he has received five other OBIES for directing and for sustained achievement. He is the founder and artistic director of the non-profit Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Russell Scholl is a NYC-based musician and collector/archivist/curator of diverse cultural media, whose archive has served as a resource for artists, musicians, filmmakers and various arts institutions. He curates film/video programs on a wide variety of subjects (the history of animation; early jazz shorts; educational and propaganda films; etc.) at venues in and around New York City, including Barbes, Southpaw, Freddy's Backroom, The Klaus Gallery and elsewhere. He is also known for having produced a compact disc by noted American folk artist Howard Finster, "The Night Howard Finster Got Saved" (Global Village Music) and appeared in the 2007 PBS television documentary, "Soundies: A Musical HIstory".
Martin Wilner is an artist living and working in New York City. Represented by Pierogi in Williamsburg, he has been in several group and solo shows. His ongoing subway diary, "The Journal of Evidence Weekly," is available online at www.tjew.com. "Making History: July 2004" appeared on the cover of Pierogi Press #11. He is also a Clinical Assistant Professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has a private practice in Manhattan.