Respectable Creatures

Jack Smith’s “live films” might incorporate footage going back to the mid 1950s . Thus, Respectable Creatures intercuts material from Smith’s first movie, Buzzards Over Bagdad , with scenes shot over a decade later during carnival in Rio de Janeiro, and scenes from Normal Love, including an alternate version of The Yellow Sequence. The extant footage of the 16mm film which Smith may have begun in the early 1950s while living in Los Angeles and was apparently still shooting when he first met Ken Jacobs in 1956, suggests a relatively straightforward gloss on the Maria Montez vehicle, The Arabian Nights – specifically drawing upon a scene that involves a harem girl and her lover putting poison in the caliph’s wine. Jacobs regarded Smith’s intentions as devoid of irony – although that was certainly not the case a decade or more later when Smith reassembled the footage, discovered in a film can labeled Respectable Creatures (which, according to Ela Troyano , who assisted Smith in the early ‘80s , was used to ship the still-banned Flamingo Creatures to the Restless Language Film Festival in Genoa, Italy in 1981). A version of this composition, also incorporating material from I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo, was shown in the spring of 1984 at the Millennium in New York under the rubric Normal Fantasy. The posthumous film is accompanied by tapes made by Smith in Brazil. (J. Hoberman)