Jerry Tartaglia Movies
- 2006
- Add Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis to Queue Add Jack Smith & The Destruction of Atlantis to top of Queue
The underground art of renegade performance artist, photographer, and filmmaker Jack Smith is explored through the images he created and the words of those who knew him best in filmmaker Mary Jordan's tribute to the man believed to have inspired some of Andy Warhol's most iconic works. A virulent utopian and anti-capitalist whose works spanned from the 1960s to the late-1980s, Smith gained notoriety early on in his career when he went battled the Supreme Court over the banning of his controversial work "Flaming Creatures." An enigmatic artist whose work remains on the fringes of the mainstream despite the praise of curators from the Whitney to the Louvre, the effects of Smith's powerful influence are explored in interviews with those who both loved and hated Smith. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- 1968
Unscreened until 1998, almost a decade after Jack Smith's death, I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo contains footage he'd shot in the 1960s and '70s. The introduction is an unsettling montage of steamy manhole covers (which Smith had sometimes shown as a short called Marshgas of Flatulandia). A pair of transvestites are seen living in a hovel with a shrine to Mario Montez. For Smith, Universal's promotion of Yvonne De Carlo as a replacement for Mario Montez typified how profiteers substitute the ersatz for the genuine, and so he spends most of this film as the titular male version of Yvonne De Carlo: an adored celebrity, bearded and wearing a leopard-print jacket, who endlessly signs his autograph and poses for photographs. The ending consists of film Smith shot of an old New York movie house being demolished, which literalizes the film's themes of cultural vandalism and irreparable loss. ~ Nicole Gagne, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jack Smith, Ondine, (more)
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