Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Flaming Creatures and Scotch Tape

230 Flaming Creatures and Scotch Tape Though you’d never imagine this from the mainstream press, there are signs that experimental film is on the rise again, as a taste as well as an undertaking—even if it’s often returning in mutated forms like video or areas of filmmaking where we least expect to find it. At the Rotterdam Film Festival three weeks ago, hundreds of Dutch viewers, most of them in their twenties, stormed the largest multiplex in Holland—and one of the best designed facilities I know of anywhere, suggesting an unlikely cross between a Borders and a Beaubourg, a mall and an airport—to see work thought to have little or no drawing power in this country. Some of their choices included short experimental videos from Berlin, Providence, and London (at a crowded weekday afternoon program called ‘‘City Sounds’’); a very charismatic Taiwanese feature, Ko I-cheng’s Blue Moon, whose five reels can be shown in any order (they all feature the same characters and settings, but whether the five plots match up chronologically or as parallel fictional universes—signifying flashbacks, flash-forwards, or variations on a theme—is left up to the viewer); several videos and the most recent feature of Alexander Sokurov. And in a smaller and older Rotterdam multiplex, comparable crowds were turning up for an Ernie Gehr retrospective, Jon Jost’s first video, and experimental documentaries from all over, a few shown with live musical accompaniment. (The festival was also showing pictures like Deconstructing Harry and The Ice Storm, but for once these weren’t overpowering the more experimental fare; if anything, it was the arthouse blockbusters that seemed relatively marginalized at this event.) Sampling all of the above, I began to think that, speaking very broadly, there are two main trends in experimental work right now, and the chief dividing line between them may be the presence or absence of music. The films and videos with music tend to draw bigger crowds and offer more collective experiences; the works without music, most of them made by older artists, usually have a more one-to-one relationship with each viewer. Another way of describing the difference would be to say that the more popular work starts with what a young mediasavvy viewer is already likely to feel at home with—TV, music, a built-in skepticism about both media and political change—and the more difficult work assumes a less well-traveled path, for better and for worse. Which tradition did Jack Smith (1932–89) belong to? Surely more the first one OTHER CANONS, OTHER CANONIZERS 231 than the second, despite the fact that skepticism about political change is not an emotion I would think about ascribing to Flaming Creatures, Smith’s masterpiece —only to some of its explicators and champions. But it’s important to distinguish between traditions of filmmaking and traditions of film viewing. Starting this Thursday, February 26, the Film Center is presenting four separate Jack Smith programs over three consecutive days, and showing Flaming Creatures with Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra all three days. At one time or another, I’ve seen about five of the seven hours in this retrospective, and to my mind this work is split quite dramatically between films with sound and music on the one hand and silent footage on the other—not because Smith deliberately divvied up his work in that fashion but because the original functions and settings of most of his work no longer exist. Properly speaking, there are only two surviving integral films by Jack Smith, the 3-minute color Scotch Tape (1962) and the 42-minute black-and-white Flaming Creatures (1963). Everything else comprises unedited or reedited footage by Smith that he used in his live performances and footage by others recording some of his performances, live and otherwise. (Some of this latter footage has been edited into ‘‘finished’’ works, like Blonde Cobra, and some hasn’t.) Seven years of research and restoration by J. Hoberman (the series curator) and Jerry Tartaglia preceded this program, and one appreciates all the historical and archival decisions involved. But the fact remains that there’s a world of difference between Flaming Creatures and the remainder of the program that no amount of good will can fully erase. It’s the difference between one of the greatest and most pleasurable avant-garde movies ever made and large heaps of suggestive or not-sosuggestive supplementary material. And roughly speaking, moving...