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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i've only seen jack smith as an actor so far, it was someone else's movie-- i haven't seen flaming creatures, only bits of it. the stuff i saw him in belonged to ken jacobs and… someone else i forget right now. oh yes in chumlum. but the documentary about smith was very compelling-- for a lot of reasons too late in the evening to mention (i've had some rum). still, i might like the stuff he directed when i actually get to see it. as for the "acting", in the first part of little stabs at happiness, the "couple" with the "babies" where he eats out the dolls crotch, it was disturbing but great-- you know, some sort of dumb family scene and the baby gets violated-- it worked. but it was only the additions after that where i lost my patience with ken jacobs (not really with jack smith).
i do like maya deren actually. not all the time but i "get" her. and anger. not really brakhage (too abstract i suppose, and i can't look at it for too long). anger bores me, but he bores me the right way-- he bores me with an excess of style, i suppose-- but he has tons of style. i don't see his work as cerebral or intellectual-- i actually find it pretty raw. and that's what saddened me about mario banana (the andy warhol thing w/ mario montez)-- what could have been a sort of apotheosis of style (a la anger) becomes a kind of banana porn which yes, maybe it was supposed to be funny, but i found to be a waste of a great drag queen. i don't know, maybe i was too annoyed at the time. if it had been mario montez in a kenneth anger set it would have been something brilliant. was mario montez ever in anger movies? anyway, back to the rum!
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If you didn't like Chumlum I can't see you being into the films Jack Smith actually directed. They're variations on the same kind of thing.
I don't think Anger ever worked with Mario Montez or anyone from the NY underground scene. I imagine he saw himself as 'above all that'. The West Coast scene seemed far less shambolic than the East Coast's. There's a certain professionalism to Anger and Deren's stuff - technically at least - that you won't really find in most of the stuff coming out of NY at that time.