Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006)

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1. 

   Blocho

   I was startled by how much Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis made me think of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” especially her attack on the good/bad paradigm of aesthetic appreciation. And since Jack Smith seems nothing if not campy, I thought I would present my reactions in bullet-point format a la Sontag.
   
   • The movie chronicles a process of self-creation and self-negation. It is not a documentary biopic in anything more than a rudimentary sense. The closest it gets to biography is the brief sequence early in the movie about Smith’s childhood and family relationships.
   • The movie’s plotline is provided by Smith himself. His voiceover makes him the narrator and the author of his creation.
   • As the author, Smith must also provide the source of his own negation. His death, in its celebration of the glamor of AIDS, becomes an act of performance.
   • Smith’s art and his sense of performance spring from a camp sensibility and from the expression of being homosexual in a closed society, manifested most strikingly in emotions that cannot be contained (thus the emphasis on raging and flaming).
   • Maria Montez becomes the highest symbol of self-actualization for Smith. By embracing the image of her on his deathbed, he makes his demise part of his artistic progress.
   • Smith’s work transcends the boundaries of the various media and venues which contain it. His life is his performance. And it is a work of art that can be entirely conceptual. He proceeds with his performances even when there is no audience.
   • The films of Maria Montez were only poor constructions that tried to approximate her magic. For Smith, her art was her ability to believe and make others believe in her beauty and passion and glamor. Such magic exists whether or not it is consciously artistic or performative. The idea of Atlantis as a magical realm of endless possibility is more important than any real Atlantis ever could be. And as an idea rather than an entity, it can be endlessly reinvented and adapted much as Smith’s life and art were. Thus movies, like everything Smith produced, became a cultural agent outside the limits of the film strip
   • It did not matter in the slightest that Montez was a bad actor. Smith claims that “one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and truth.” Montez may be ridiculous and a poor thespian, but she is the way she is, valid and truthful above all.
   • As Smith points out, Montez’s appeal was entirely intuitive. Critics did not respond to her because what made her attractive had nothing to do with the written word.
   • Overall, both in the movie and in his chapter on Montez, Smith emphasizes visuality and visual aesthetic without interpretation or explanation. Smith has his own artistic sensibility. It cannot be explained because it is felt and seen rather than said. And it works for him, so who cares about anything else? 8 years 10 months ago

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