No President

The last of Jack Smith’s 16mm features – austerely black and white, more an exercise in sensibility than craft – evolved out of his November 1967 program, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight. Like Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight would mix original material with found footage including newsreel footage of the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run for president. By late March 1968, Horror and Fantasy had coalesced into Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Willkie (sic) by the Love Bandit – an all black-and-white presentation starring writer Irving Rosenthal as the infant Wendell abducted by a mustachioed pirate and sold on the block of a slave market. In early January 1969, the movie had its theatrical premiere as No President. For musical accompaniment Smith played records and also used the soundtracks of the found material, albeit slowed down for being projected at silent speed.

The surviving version No President alternates scenes shot in the Plaster Foundation with found footage – including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip, apparently from the late 1940s , of an unidentified couple singing “A Sunday Kind of Love”, and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the future Farmers of America. The narrative is structured around two tableaux. In the first, the future presidential candidate (Rosenthal) is attended by a nurse and then abducted from his crib by a mustachioed pirate (Doris Desmond) out of a Spanish galleon flick; in the second, which features a professional belly-dancer as well as the singer Tally Brown striking an agitated diva pose, Willkie is auctioned and sold on the block of a slave market modeled on the one in the 1942 Maria Montez vehicle, Arabian Nights. Thus, Smith’s hothouse childhood fantasies merge with entropic , harshly lit glamour scenes wherein the garishly costumed hobnob with the brazenly nude. As befits a political scenario, No President is rife with representations of the phallus – metaphoric and otherwise. Among other things, the movie literalizes the idea of a champagne cocktail. Parker Tyler would hail No President as “an even more daring exploitation of the themes in Flaming Creatures,” and the Selection Committee for the newly established Anthology Film Archives voted to include both in its canon of essential cinema. (J. Hoberman )