Jack Smith was one of the founders of the trash aesthetic, the typical trash aesthetic. In his desire to shock the layman, disorient the viewer and mock his modern Hollywood, the artist (Smith director, photographer, painter, one of the fathers of performance) did not know the measure. His films were seized, qualified as pornography, caused heated discussions. He never considered himself a film director, like his friend Andy Warhol, and had to resort to filming in order to convey his ideas about creativity to as many viewers as possible. At the same time, in France, the founder of situationism Guy Debord shot anti-cinema, who consistently destroyed the language of art as the basis of the bourgeois class.
Jack Smith was far from politics. His experiments dealt primarily with popular culture. His favorite technique is to shoot on the illuminated film a candid show, some dances, hermaphrodites, transvestites, a circus of freaks. He parodied popular culture, B-class cinema, film aesthetics, mocked Puritan morality and at the same time the audience’s craving for the forbidden. His legacy gradually formed a whole direction in cinema, the so-called niche cinema trash, which was paid tribute to such masters as John Waters, Lloyd Kaufman, Joel M. Reed. For thrashing since the time of Smith is characterized by buffoonery, provocation, deliberate stupidity and primitiveness. At the same time, thrash so successfully mimics different genres that uninformed viewers refer to thrash everything that they do not like, any hack. Strictly speaking, Ed Wood is less of a thrashmaker than Smith, Reed and Waters, as Wood wanted to imitate big cinema and shoot according to the rules of Hollywood. And the technical malpractice and ridiculous plot do not make the film thrash.
Jack Smith never maintained his legacy, did not keep an archive, and quickly forgot about the creation, so his work is quite unknown and not all survived. Smith was a proponent of a kind of automatic creativity that happened by accident, photographing and photographing whatever came to mind. At the same time, his films have a certain magic, and from the deconstruction of the film image, a new aesthetic is born, which quickly won fans around the world.
What makes thrash attractive? Unlimited freedom of expression, rejection of all rules and clichés, ridicule of everything and everything. Not an ounce of thought, but a sea of fun. Here's his 3-minute film Scotch, where the title is completely out of line, like a random sketch of a crazy dance at the Lincoln Center construction site. A deliberately degraded image leads to the fact that the viewer does not understand much on the screen. It's not necessary. Just plunge into the fun of a bygone era, where the characters, together with the author, without fear of appearing stupid, indulge in spontaneous idiocy, much like in the film by Lars von Trier Idiots. Wake up the idiot. This is what any real thrash movie calls for.
6.5 out of 10