Beyond the Rented World: An Introduction

In conversation with Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka in 1973, American underground artist Jack Smith shifts the focus of the 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 the most notorious legal battle in American avant-garde film history, Smith posits that the authorities at the time could not accept the 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 the film’s depiction of poor people, Smith offers the following lengthy, considered, and fascinating response:

It’s not a story in which the 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 the family try to raise their children comfortably. Things like that. No refrigerators. No refrigerator worship . . . the values depicted in the 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 all 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.²

Smith thus offers a political reading of the 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 landlordism 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 the financial, emotional, and psychological burden of regular rent payments can hardly be reduced to an individual problem. For Smith, “landlordism” is the ultimate evil, “the one problem,” he explains to a seemingly unconvinced Kubelka, “that’s crushing life everywhere in the 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 the great visionaries of American film.”⁵ Fortunately, and despite his chaotic lifestyle, from the mid-1950s until his death in 1989 from the 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 the most significant figures in the 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 the funniest stuff he could think of” and to represent “different ideas of glamor.”⁶ It was in the early 1970s that Smith became increasingly focused on the 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 the subject of landlordism. I tried to rewrite the Hamlet story so that it was a family of landlords instead of royalty. This was called Hamlet in the Rented World. I got the play ready. It was mostly produced. And then I was evicted from my studio, so the play was never done as a play. But since then I’ve made a movie of some of it.⁷

Hamlet was not the only classic play that Smith subjected...