Product Description

During thirty years of astonishing activity as a filmmaker, photographer and performer, Jack Smith produced a body of creative, antic writing that intersects and transcends the genres of hothouse fantasy, criticism and social comment. Bringing together long unavailable essays, performance scripts, interviews and other material, "Wait for me at the Bottom of the Pool" reveals the ideas and personality of an artist whose distinctive vision has influenced generations of filmmakers and performance artists. With caustic wit, Smith praises the performances of Maria Montez as well as the sculpture of Walter de Maria, examines the cult success of Reefer Madness and the uses of pornography, and discusses the perils of democracy, the evils of property and the police state, art history and architecture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1213399 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 177 pages

From Amazon.com
During his lifetime Jack Smith was a legendary playwright, critic, and filmmaker with a small, but faithful cult following. His movie masterpiece Flaming Creatures defined avant-garde cinema in the 1960s. This collection of interviews, essays, and play scripts brings together most of Smith's unpublished work. With his sharp wit, shrewd observations, and radical aesthetics, Smith--who died of AIDS in 1989--is now viewed by many as an innovative founding father of post-modern performance and gay sensibility. Smith's work is still shocking and Wait For Me at the Bottom of the Pool is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary theater and film.

From Kirkus Reviews
A vividly eccentric and entertaining posthumous collection of essays, interviews, scripts, cartoons, and fragmentary jottings from one of the granddaddies of American avant-garde filmmaking. Best known for the underground (and much banned) classic Flaming Creatures, Smith possessed a highly original, camp- inflected aesthetic that inspired everyone from Andy Warhol to Robert Wilson. Consider his synopsis of the grand finale of his film Sinbad in the Rented World: ``In the confusion of the climatic [sic] roach stampede, the Lobster in his final priestly disguise with the forehead-earring of exoticism in his back pocket, is drowned in Plaster Lagoon and now is hardened over.'' As this illustrates, Smith's work was informed by a unique, gnomic argot and set of stylized obsessions bordering on fetishism. Hoberman (film critic for the Village Voice) and Leffingwell (curator for an exhibition about Smith that will open this spring) helpfully provide a kind of field guide to this world where ``Lobsters'' are greedy landlords, ``mynah birds'' are imitators, and the phrase ``scum of Bagdad'' is a term of high praise. But the queen of Smith's universe was the 1940s B-movie actress Maria Montez. Not only did she ``feature'' in many of Smith's films, she also inspired his aesthetic theories. In a seminal 1962 essay, included here, Smith turns the conventions of Hollywood film upside down. Naturalistic acting (``reptilian acting'') is bad; bad acting is good; visuals are everything and script/dialogue only get in the way; and kitsch is noble and uplifting. Though the issues it raises are far from settled, this ringing defense of ``pure cinema'' anticipates not only Pop Art but postmodernism as well. Much of the rest of this collection is either a reiteration or an elaboration of these core theories. Smith is perhaps too obscure for the general movie-going public, but as these pieces ably demonstrate, he is an important part of the American avant-garde tradition. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author
J. Hoberman was born in New York and grew up reading The Village Voice where he has been the senior film critic since 1988. He teaches in the Humanities Division at Cooper Union, co-edited Wait For Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, and is the author of half a dozen books, including Midnight Movies (written with Jonathan Rosenbaum), Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media, and The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism.