J. Hoberman in Person! Flaming Creatures/No President

J. Hoberman in Person!

Saturday, November 10th at 7pm
Charles S. Cohen Screening Room
475 Park Ave S. 6th Floor
Suggested donation $10
RSVP required : filmmakerscoop@gmail.com

The fifth installment of “Counter-Culture / Counter-Cinema” focuses on the work Jack Smith (1932-1989), whose polymorphously perverse performances and ignominious transgressions of social, political, and institutional decorum made him both a pioneer and a pariah in avant-garde artistic circles. Known for taking inspiration from Hollywood’s aesthetic opulence (above all films by Josef von Sternberg and Erich von Stroheim) and critiquing the capitalist infrastructure upon which Los Angeles’ dream factory was built, Smith’s uncategorizable output hijacked the cinematic apparatus in order to devalue its conventional commodity status and open new horizons of sociopolitical redemption rooted in the ephemerality of experience. At a time when violent sexual desire as well as the oppression of non-normative sexualities characterizes daily life in the U.S., and transgressive satire appears to have lost its bite, Jack Smith’s fragmentary, disturbing, and anti-commercial cinematic praxis demands to be understood anew.
Film critic and Smith scholar J. Hoberman will be in attendance to introduce the program and lead a Q&A afterwards.

A Village Voice film critic from 1978 through 2011, J. Hoberman is the author of On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc and the co-editor of Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith.

Program:
Jack Smith. Flaming Creatures. 1962. 16mm. Black & White. 43 min.
Jack Smith. No President. 1967. 16mm. Black & White. 45 min.
TRT: ~ 90 min.
Programmed by Coop Scholar-in-Residence David Fresko