Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.

"Catalyst of the New York underground from the 1950s through the 1970s, and a direct influence on Andy Warhol, among a multitude of likewise indebted artists, Jack Smith is an overlooked genius worth an incisive onscreen portrait," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Mary Jordan's Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis attempts to paint that portrait by documenting Smith's often exploited legacy, but in striving to emulate the one-of-a-kind director's aesthetic too often betrays the spirit of its subject with obfuscating messiness." Also at indieWIRE, an interview with Jordan.

"It's Jordan's feat to make a linear, talking-heads documentary (among the heads are Jonas Mekas, Robert Wilson, John Waters, Nick Zedd and John Zorn) that still manages to evoke something of Smith's floating, ravishingly colorful dreamscapes - a menagerie of creatures that, even as they're captured on film, are already fading into the air," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Updated through 4/12.

For Ed Halter, writing in the Voice, the film "blips quickly through a surprisingly slick televisual format... Such a treatment proves paradoxically welcome." At the same time, though, "Jordan makes little mention of the [Flaming Creatures] controversy that drew in everyone from Susan Sontag to Strom Thurmond.... The omission seems strange, given Jordan's argument that Smith is the secret font of all that is cool in late-20th-century culture." Still, the interviews "attest to Smith's reputation as a pivotal influence on film, performance art, gallery installation, and photography; as Richard Foreman once declared, everybody stole from Jack."

Eric Henderson, writing for Slant, finds the film "tries a little too fastidiously to piece together a life its owner tried quite brazenly to shatter and disseminate into a thousand shards of passive-aggressive antipathy. But then again, the portrait it gives is itself awfully incomplete and fragmented, so I'd say Jordan and Smith are Even Steven."

Matt Singer at IFC News: "I felt like I learned a great deal about Smith the artist, and only a little about Smith the man. Perhaps Jordan's point is that to Smith, the two aspects were one and the same."

Updates, 4/11: Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the New York Times, finds the film "worth seeing - even though Ms Jordan dices Mr Smith's films into snippets that don't convey their languorous rhythms, and seems content to mythologize rather than dissect.... You come away impressed by Smith's charisma, versatility and integrity, while also wondering if a man so abrasively self-important could have made such playful art."

Michael Sicinski has a good talk with Jordan for ScreenGrab.

Scott Macaulay posts an excerpt from Steve Gallagher's interview with Jordan that'll be appearing in the next issue of Filmmaker.

Updates, 4/12: "Jordan unzips the myth of cultural pioneering," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Behind the legend of the rebellious 1960s, a more fecund period than today, she finds the hard fact that art reputations are maintained by business relationships, hustling and competition - focusing on Smith's rivalry with his more shrewd and organized contemporaries, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas."

"Jordan does everything you could ask to rehabilitate Smith," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, "but this passionate, paranoid, prodigiously committed artist - like the vanished downtown art scene he helped launch - remains a fading enigma, his legacy ambivalent and his work just beyond our grasp."

"One of the intriguing paradoxes of Smith's experimental films is that they embrace commercial cinema while simultaneously subverting it," notes Eric Kohn at the Reeler, adding, "Ultimately, the decline of Smith's work after Flaming Creatures in 1963 symbolizes the death of a scene that was sustained primarily by his efforts."

"While the usual procession of talking heads is present, Jordan's greatest talent may be knowing how and when to make room for her subject," suggests Steve Erickson at Nerve.

Posted by dwhudson at April 10, 2007 1:54 PM