New York Dispatch. 5.

The Tribeca Film Festival came to an end last night after the awards were announced on Saturday. Art and artists kept coming up in odd places in the program. I suppose this shouldn't be such a surprise, given that Julian Schnabel designed the festival's poster and Jeff Koons, another celeb, designed one of the awards. (Strange, though, in a festival that's committed to free expression. Didn't Schnabel keep a post-9/11 documentary about him from ever being shown?)

One documentary film about an artist that won an honorable mention was Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, by Mary Jordan. The bio-doc, four years in the making, seeks to introduce the influential filmmaker and performer to a broader audience. The result is a review of Smith's life and work on the model of the PBS doc, only a bit more stylish and a bit more louche with penis shots that are likely to be spliced out if public television has anything to say about it. It's part celebration of a character who was nothing if not flamboyant, part lamentation that Smith was not better known during his lifetime for work that touched film, fashion, theater, photography, and anything that can be described as queer culture. If you know Smith, you know this material.

Smith, who died of AIDS in 1989, made lots of "underground" films (acted in a lot more), mostly during the 60s, but he's most famous for Flaming Creatures, a deliberately overexposed orgiastic celebration/satire of epic exoticism that he shot on the roof of a theater in 1962. The denunciations of that movie turned a small film into a scandal, into an art world epiphany.

Smith's film goddess was the 1940s tropical epic star, Maria Montez. Her acting-impaired performances were all part of the fun and fantasy. In his own films, he almost always worked with amateur actors whom he called "superstars." Sound familiar? Bear in mind that Andy Warhol's appropriation of that term and of Smith's celebration of lavish kitsch reflect Warhol's skills as a packager, rather than an original thinker. Smith was also a practitioner of the "work in progress," fitting costumes and editing films as he showed them to friends at late-night screenings in his Soho loft. Since his works were unfinished, they could not be sold and exploited, Smith argued. In the doc, Smith sets out to become infected with AIDS, which he thought would be a dramatic way to die. Only the few friends that he had left at the time were around to take notice of that performance.

The drama of the documentary ends there, with tributes to an underappreciated muse and genius. Yet Smith's legacy was material as well as mythological, and that's another drama - an unfinished one, appropriately enough, given the man whose work is at its center. He left an apartment filled with pictures, films and costumes, piled high with all sorts of other personal property. It turned out that Smith did have money, thousands of dollars in bonds. What he lacked was a signed will. Sadly, the landlord took over the apartment that Smith had decorated as an orientalist shrine and destroyed the murals there. When Mary Sue Slater, the sister whom he hadn't seen since 1956, arrived in New York after Smith's funeral, she took some bonds, a table and other objects, and returned to Texas. Her son, Smith's nephew, who had shown some interest in his uncle's work, was also incommunicado. Smith's friend, Penny Arcade, and the film critic J Hoberman set about conserving and preserving what Smith had left behind, which would have been thrown away without their intervention. (Earlier, Hoberman did obtain consent from Smith's nephew to represent him "in matters of artistic development concerning the cataloging, transporting, and storing.") Arcade and Hoberman formed the Plaster Foundation, named for the loft where Smith presented his performances. One result of that long project was an exhibition held at PS 1 in Queens in 1997, which revived interest in Smith's work but stirred no interest from his family.

A few years later, when the documentary was underway, Arcade and Hoberman heard unexpectedly from Mary Sue Slater, who claimed to be Smith's legal heir and demanded control of the estate. A New York court ruled for the family, whose lawyer says that Smith's sister would like the body of work to be sold to a museum. (Earlier efforts to place works held by the Plaster Foundation in a museum found no takers who were willing to pay.) The Plaster Foundation has asked to be compensated for the cost of its conservation work, and has also sued the filmmaker's production company for unpaid licensing fees for the use of images in the film.

What we saw at Tribeca (and will soon see at the many festivals that want to show the film, according to the director's responses to questions after screenings) was the conventional wisdom on Jack Smith, selectively presented. The filmmaker says she'll also be publishing a book. There's far more to the story - the assessment of Smith's influence among younger generations and the ongoing battle over Smith's estate, involving the family that scorned him and his homosexuality. Stay tuned.

Other films had more harmony with their subjects. In Leaving Home Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, Gerald Fox journeyed with Frank from New York, Frank's adopted city, to stark, windblown Nova Scotia. At every step of the way, there's a delicate interplay between Frank's life and work, with the grey fragmentation that seems right for its subject. The early influential photographs are shown and praised; the later work reveals a troubled subject, with a depth and a poignancy that we rarely see in any film about any artist. Frank seems not to have approved of the film - perhaps he spoke too frankly, if I can use that adverb - with the result that it can be shown theatrically once a year - the same penalty that the Rolling Stones imposed on Cocksucker Blues, Frank's 1972 film about the group. If you ever have a chance to see this extraordinary doc, see it. Who knows when that next chance will be.

Another doc about artists that captured the creative spirit and the atmosphere that nourishes it is When the Road Bends... Tales of a Gypsy Caravan. Jasmine Dellal goes on a North American tour with five Gypsy bands. These are not typical groups - a brass band, a band of Indians from Rajasthan performing in the same tradition that finds echoes in flamenco, which we also see. Dellal's film is a road movie and a concert film, but it's also a study of origins and the persistence of those origins in a world determined to eliminate them. Albert Maysles, now 79, shot the doc with the same skill that he has brought to filming performances for five decades. The filming of the village in Romania that keeps the tradition alive is just as compelling. So is the sound. When the Road Bends could have quite a life in the theaters, which it has earned, if the response at Tribeca was any indication.

Note, 5/23/06: A bit of clarification on the complex and at times confusing case involving Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. In the above, appearing as it originally ran, it's stated that Jim Hoberman and Penny Arcade, operating as the Plaster Foundation, were suing the film's production company for unpaid licensing fees. It should have read that the Plaster Foundation, an organization founded to preserve and archive Smith's work, is being sued by the film's producers who charge that they were not given access to works that their contract with the Plaster Foundation provided. In court papers, the film's producer, Kenneth Wayne Peralta, states in an affidavit that this lack of access prevented the producers from completing the film, which premiered at Tribeca. Hoberman and Penny Arcade maintain that the access to the Jack Smith materials exceeded what was allowed in the contract, and that the producers, Tongue Press LLC, have not paid their contractual fees for the use of that material.

Posted by dwhudson at May 8, 2006 1:38 PM