Beyond the Rented World: An Introduction

Abstract

In conversation with Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka in 1973, American underground artist Jack Smith shifts focus of censorious reactions to his film Flaming Creatures (1962-63) from its possible obscenity to its anticapitalism.1 Reflecting back, after almost ten years, on what is certainly most notorious legal battle in American avant-garde film history, Smith posits that authorities at time could not accept film's attitudes towards commercialism. Flaming Creatures, he maintains, depicts poor people without any sort of agreement with commercialism that any authorities would want to see. Asked by Kubelka about film's depiction of poor people, Smith offers following lengthy, considered, and fascinating response:It's not a story in which son is going off to college or whatever ... or in which, uh . . . there are no automobiles in it. No automobile worship. Or anything that depends on-or family try to raise their children comfortably. Things like that. No refrigerators. No refrigerator worship . . . values depicted in film are not especially a set of people achieving financial status in some way or other-which is basically what commercial film would depict. For instance, a story about a widow clinging to a home or of these plots really have at their basis property in one way or another, clinging to property, attaining property. I don't think that you can think of a commercial film that didn't have at its basis the-uh-subject of landlordism.2Smith thus offers a political reading of narrative and visual aspects of his seminal underground film, which is rarely described in such terms.3 Moreover, he adds depth and substance to what is obviously more complex than a mere hatred of capitalism.4 The subject of very likely became part of Smith's aesthetic agenda as a result of his difficulties paying rent for his various Manhattan lofts and apartments. But financial, emotional, and psychological burden of regular rent payments can hardly be reduced to an individual problem. For Smith, landlordism is ultimate evil, the one problem, he explains to a seemingly unconvinced Kubelka, that's crushing life everywhere in world.Smith is certainly most famous for that cinematic burst of aesthetic innovation and sexual and gender transgression known as Flaming Creatures. Critic and Smith specialist J. Hoberman maintains, Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among great visionaries of American film.5 Fortunately, and despite his chaotic lifestyle, from mid-1950s until his death in 1989 from complications of AIDS, Smith made a great deal of additional work, including films, photos, performances, collages, drawings, costumes, audio recordings, and written texts. Over slightly more than three decades, Smith worked with and influenced some of most significant figures in postwar American avant-garde in film, music, theater, and performance-for example, Tony Conrad, Beverly Grant, Ken Jacobs, Charles Ludlam, Angus MacLise, Judith Malina, Mario Montez, Ronald Tavel, Carmelita Tropicana, Andy Warhol, Robert Wilson, LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Zorn.Initially, Smith's work was not inspired by an anticapitalist critique. As he explains to Kubelka, Flaming Creatures emerged simply from a desire to film all funniest stuff he could think oF' and to represent different ideas of glamor.6 It was in early 1970s that Smith became increasingly focused on difficulties of negotiating a world dominated by capital and motivated by profit. A year ago, he tells Kubelka in early 1973,I made a very strong conscious effort to make a play that dealt with subject of landlordism. I tried to rewrite Hamlet story so that it was a family of landlords instead of royalty. This was called Hamlet in Rented World. I got play ready. It was mostly produced. …