

This leads me to conclude that if Alfred Hitchcock had had the unbridled nerve and savagery in 1960 to simply show a nude Janet Leigh taking a shower in ‘Psycho’ and enjoying it rather than show her body double getting slashed to ribbons with a knife, he might well have faced serious trouble with puritanical American censors.
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Smith saw the movie strictly as a comedy and eventually became so alienated by Mekas’s rhetorical and institutional appropriation of it that he never made another film that achieved a final form.”
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The object of repeated police raids, it quickly became a cause cel è bre for free speech in general and ‘underground cinema’ in particular, especially as these were being defined by critic and programmer Mekas, the film’s most vocal champion at the time. It’s an act of love, not of revenge.”īut “historically, the impact of ‘Flaming Creatures’ in 1963 had less to do with this love than with its presumed sexual content: flaccid penises, bouncing breasts, evocations of an orgy. Love Wastes Andy Hardy’….’Flaming Creatures’ is mesmerizing and luscious partly because Smith is more interested in emulating various features starring Maria Montez or directed by Josef von Sternberg than in subverting them. In this respect it shares a kinship with found-footage films that use mainstream material - a relatively recent tradition stretching all the way from Craig Baldwin to Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’ to…Martin Arnold’s ‘Alone. Apart from Joseph Cornell’s ‘Rose Hobart’ (1939), ‘Flaming Creatures’ may be the first major avant-garde movie to have embraced Hollywood even as it more implicitly defied its narrative procedures. “I know that, through ‘For The Record,’ he’ll surprise and sometimes shock viewers with his riveting explorations of the origins of American culture.As I wrote in the Chicago Reader 21 years ago, “Implicitly or explicitly, all avant-garde cinema has a dialectical relationship to mainstream cinema, which usually means Hollywood. “Jack’s a Mic original, and his sharp, fearless reporting has found big audiences across many platforms,” said Kerry Lauerman, executive news director, Mic. In For the Record, Jack dissects the intersection between culture, politics, and the past, exploring just how these intertwined facets of American society often have dark histories that permeate every part of American life. Stand-out stories include his coverage of Charlottesville and his thorough analysis and insight into the women of the alt-right. Most recently, Jack has been deeply embedded in the alt-right movement, covering its mainstreamification through on-the-ground reporting from rallies and protests across the country. The first episode, going live today, May 1st, will take a look at the unexpected origins of graham crackers, which were invented to suppress sexual desire.Īt Mic, Jack reports mainly on extremist political movements including fascism, nationalism and white supremacy.


In each episode, Jack will expose the troubled roots of various objects, activities, and places in our everyday lives - sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always fascinating. Mic today announced the premiere of For the Record, a new show hosted by senior writer and correspondent, Jack Smith IV, which will air on Facebook Watch Tuesdays at 1:00pm ET and live on the platform for on-demand viewing.
