One Dead Queer

Taking place in Berlin over the 2009 Halloween weekend and curated by actress Susanne Sachsse, film curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, and queer cinema scholar Marc Siegel, Live Film! Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World wrestled with the legacy of one of the most potent creative forces of the New York underground scene from the late 1950s until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1989. A key influence on and collaborator of Andy Warhol, Ronald Tavel, Charles Ludlam, Tony Conrad, and countless other avant-garde innovators, Smith was also notoriously tempestuous, paranoid, and manipulative. More than fifty visual and performing artists, filmmakers, critics, curators, and Smith associates from Europe and North America—representing varying generations, practices, and scenes—were invited to create new works in dialogue with Smith and his work, all premiered at this massive, five-day public event. The festival was an agonistic hagiography, with hero worship always inflected with resentment, festivity with in-fighting, joy with bitterness.