Last weekend, Berlin’s institute for film and video art Arsenal and the theatre Hebbel am Ufer held the festival "LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World" in celebration of the acclaimed, yet largely obscure filmmaker and pioneer of underground cinema Jack Smith.

Often referred to as the founding father of American performance art, Smith's aesthetics have influenced a generation of theater companies - from Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Charles Ludlam to the Living Theater and the Wooster Group. With his campy, no-budget visual language, Smith can also be credited for influencing the cinematic work of contemporaries such as John Waters and Andy Warhol while also serving as an inspiration and star of Warhol’s Factory. Before long, a younger generation of artists became aware of Smith’s unique style and exploration of the body and gender, spawning countless references by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Nan Goldin and Matthew Barney, as well as the musicians John Zorn, Lou Reed.

Smith’s most famous production is doubtlessly Flaming Creatures (1962), a stunning travesty on Hollywood b-movies, exoticism and eroticized gender play that helped to shape drag culture as we know it today. At the time of its release, 'F.C.' was branded as pornography and incited one of the most sensational scandals in the history of American film. The work is still banned in the United States to this day. Most of Smith’s oeuvre following the scandal was conceived as “Live Film” performances, a collection of edited and reedited film material, sound excerpts, slides, text, and music. Smith died in 1989 as a result of AIDS.

The Berlin festival not only offers the rare chance to view all of Smith’s films, it also attempts to recapture the essence of his genre-defying concept of film art while providing it with a framework beyond that of gender-bending, queer performance. Festival curators Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus invited an illustrious host of lecturers, musicians, film makers and scholars to join the event’s program, including critics Diedrich Diedrichsen, Douglas Crimp, as well as former Warhol superstar Penny Arcade, and the legendary drag performer Mario Montez (making his first public appearance in thirty years).

Particularly true to the original spirit of Smith’s Live Films was the four and a half hour musical performance “Impacted Crustacean Jack Smithian Delirium” created by Tony Conrad and Gordon W. and featuring performances from the Berlin art collective BASSO. Thankfully, the event featured a continuous admission.

Tony Conrad, creator of the original music for Smith’s Flaming Creatures, is exhibiting his piece “Re-Framing Creatures” at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery. On view are five 16-mm loops created between 1963 and 2009, showcasing out-takes from the original film. Clearly, Conrad has a talent for turning film refuse into art. His piece Pickled Eastman Kodak 7302 (2006), a series of cut-up film in jars, was dubbed  “London’s most expensive pickles” at Frieze Art Fair after it sold to San Francisco collectors Norah and Norman Stone for around €5,000 two weeks ago.

In the text accompanying the show, Conrad explains how Re-Framing Creatures came about:

“1963… in my apartment Jack Smith is editing his comedy Flaming Creatures with a splicer and a tiny film viewer. I had never seen this before. What are those pieces on the floor, I ask. “O, uh. Those are out-takes,” Jack replied. I saw him throwing them away. Then I said could I have them, maybe I might want to make a movie myself one day, and he gave them to me to do that. “

Initially, Conrad created an entirely different film using the out-takes, only to put the handful of shots back into the original order of the four scenes Smith had originally planned for them. Ultimately, the show offers curious Smith fans the rare chance to see “every last remaining scrap of stolen Perutz Tropical Film that Jack shot for F.C.”

--Hili Perlson

(Images top-bottom: Diedrich Diedrichsen; Tony Conrad, Gordon W. and Maria;  Photos #1-2 taken by Denise Palma Ferrante.  Image #3: Tony Conrad,  Re-Framing Creatures, 16-mm, 1962-2009. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz.)