home/movie/2007/jack smith and the destruction of atlantis
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Not Rated
Documentary
6.6/10(7 ratings)
In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
04-11-2007
1h 34m
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Anthony Schmalz "Tony" Conrad was an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both structural film and drone music. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career, most prominently La Monte Young's 1960s New York experimental music group Theatre of Eternal Music.
Gary Indiana is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.
Indiana has written, directed and acted in a dozen plays, mostly during the early 1980s. Performed in small New York City venues like Mudd Club, Club 57, the Performing Garage and the backyard of Bill Rice's East 3rd Street studio. Earlier plays included Alligator Girls Go to College (1979); Curse of the Dog People (1980); A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking (1980), which was filmed by Michel Auder in 1981; The Roman Polanski Story (1981); Phantoms of Louisiana (1981) and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992), written with Jack Smith for performance artist Ron Vawter. The latter was filmed in 1994 by Jill Godmilow.
Indiana has acted in several mostly experimental films by, among others, Michel Auder (Seduction of Patrick, 1979, which he co-wrote with the director), Scott B and Beth B (The Trap Door, 1980), Melvie Arslanian (Stiletto, 1981, where he plays a bellhop at the bellhopless Chelsea Hotel), Jackie Raynal (Hotel New York, 1984), Ulrike Ottinger (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press [de], 1984, with Veruschka as Dorian Gray and Delphine Seyrig as Doctor Mabuse), Lothar Lambert (Fräulein Berlin, 1984), Dieter Schidor (Cold in Columbia, 1985), Valie Export (The Practice of Love, 1985) and Christoph Schlingensief (Terror 2000: Intensivstation Deutschland, 1994, in which Udo Kier kills his character with a machine gun).
A pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s, Ken Jacobs is a central figure in post-war experimental cinema. From his first films of the late 1950s to his recent experiments with digital video, his investigations and innovations have influenced countless artists.
A New Yorker by birth, Jacobs graduated from City University to find himself in the midst of the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which included artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and the experimental theater troupes of Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Although Jacobs had studied painting with Hans Hoffman, he quickly gravitated to film, finding kindred spirits in radical filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton. An early friendship with Jack Smith yielded several collaborations, including the seminal underground films Blonde Cobra (which Jonas Mekas dubbed "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema") and Little Stabs at Happiness, as well as a Provincetown beach-based live show, The Human Wreckage Review.
George Kuchar (August 31, 1942 – September 6, 2011) and his twin brother Mike began making films as teenagers in the 1950s, with 8mm film being their weapon of choice. After shocking their local amateur filmmaking club with their over-the-top stories of lust and angst, they became stars of the NYC underground scene in the 1960s, befriending the likes of Jonas Mekas and Jack Smith. Always working with the constraints of minuscule budgets and nonprofessional actors, the Kuchar’s inspiration comes from classic Hollywood melodrama. Their cheaply made pictures, rather than being held back by lack of funds, blossomed in the shackles of poverty; the garish colors of the cheap makeup and sets were perfectly complemented by the bold color range afforded by Kodachrome reversal stock. The wild (and sometimes the inverse of wild) acting, use of stock music, lack of synch sound, hyperbolic narration, and primitive special effects all combined to make tiny gems unlike anything seen before or since. The Kuchars are cited as major influences by such filmmakers as John Waters, Todd Solondz, and David Lynch.
Judith Malina was a German-born American theater and film actress, writer and director. With her husband, Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 60s.
Taylor Mead was an American writer, actor and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol's underground films filmed at Warhol's Factory, as well as in works by Robert Downey Sr., Adolfas Mekas, and Ron Rice.
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the War he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949 the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York City, where they settled down in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Two months after his arrival in New York he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema, and a screening venue.
During all this time he continued writing poetry and making films. To this date he has published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now part of Lithuanian classic literature and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diaristic forms of cinema. Mekas has also been active as an academic, teaching at the New School for Social Research, the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, New York University, and MIT.
Mekas' film The Brig was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. Other films include Walden (1969), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Lost Lost Lost (1975), Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990), Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992), As I was Moving Ahead I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), Letter from Greenpoint (2005), Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) and Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man. In 2007, he completed a series of 365 short films released on the internet -- one film every day -- and since then has continued to share new work on his website.
Since 2000, Mekas has expanded his work into the area of film installations, exhibiting at the Serpentine Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), PS1 Contemporary Art Center MoMA, Documenta of Kassel, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Venice Biennale.
William George Linich, known professionally as Billy Name, was an American photographer, filmmaker, and lighting designer. He was the archivist of The Factory from 1964 to 1970.
Born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leading artist of the 1960s Pop art movements. He ventured into a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations and writing, and controversially blurred the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics. Warhol died on February 22, 1987, in New York City.
John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). Waters wrote and directed the comedy film Hairspray (1988), which was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical and a 2007 musical film. Other films he has written and directed include Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000). His films contain elements of post-modern comedy and surrealism.
As an actor, Waters has appeared in Sweet and Lowdown (1999), 'Til Death Do Us Part (2007), Mangus! (2011), Excision (2012), Suburban Gothic (2014), and has appeared in the Child's Play franchise with Seed of Chucky (2004) and third season of the television series Chucky (2024). He hosted and produced the television series John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You (2006). Throughout his career, Waters has often collaborated with actor and drag queen Divine and his regular cast of the Dreamlanders. More recently, he performs in his touring one-man show This Filthy World.
Waters also works as a visual artist and across different media, such as installations, photography, and sculpture. The audiobooks he narrated for his books Carsick and Mr. Know-It-All were nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2015 and 2020, respectively. In 2018, Waters was named an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023.
Description above from the Wikipedia article John Waters, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Robert Wilson is an American experimental theater stage director and playwright. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer.
Holly Woodlawn was a transgender Puerto Rican actress and Warhol superstar who appeared in his movies Trash and Women in Revolt. She was probably best known as the Holly in Lou Reed's hit pop song "Walk on the Wild Side".
Mary Woronov (born December 8, 1943) is an American actress, writer, and figurative painter. She is primarily known as a "cult star" because of her work with Andy Warhol and her roles in Roger Corman's cult films.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Mary Woronov, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Nick Zedd was an American filmmaker and author based in New York City. He coined the term "Cinema of Transgression" in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work. Zedd directed several super-low-budget movies, including the feature length They Eat Scum and Geek Maggot Bingo, as well as numerous short films.
John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and improvised music. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions, which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. Zorn was described by Down Beat as "one of our most important composers".
Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid-1970s, performing with musicians across the sonic spectrum and developing experimental methods of composing new music. After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and received wide acclaim with the release of The Big Gundown, an album reworking the compositions of Ennio Morricone. He attracted further attention worldwide with the release of Spillane in 1987 and Naked City in 1990. After spending almost a decade travelling between Japan and the US, he made New York his permanent base and established his own record label, Tzadik, in the mid-1990s.
Tzadik enabled Zorn to maintain independence from the mainstream music industry and ensured the continued availability of his growing catalog of recordings, allowing him to prolifically record and release new material, issuing several new albums each year, as well as promoting the work of many other musicians. Zorn has led the hardcore bands Naked City and Painkiller, the Jewish music-inspired jazz quartet Masada, composed 613 pieces as part of the three Masada songbooks that have been performed by an array of groups, composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, and produced music for opera, sound installations, film and documentary. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with many other musicians and ensembles that perform his diverse output.
