Jack Smith | Scotch Tape / 1959, released 1962

piecing together a past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Smith (director) Scotch Tape / 1959, released 1962 [3 minutes]

 

I have to report that the first time I saw Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape, probably in 2020, I simply didn’t know what it make of it. Somehow even the images of three men, Reese Haire, Ken Jacobs, and Jerry Sims crawling through the ruble of a destroyed building mostly encountering a forest of rebar wire and tubing, half-destroyed concrete and other debris, made absolutely no sense to me, particularly given Smith’s truly remarkable abstraction of the entire event, filming in mostly black-and-white, until near the end when you see the effects in color of a piece Scotch tape affixed to the camera lens. The tape, not intentional, but which fell into the camera gate, remains throughout the film, an example what J. Hoberman describes as anticipating “Andy Warhol’s go-with-the-flow acceptance of cinematic ‘mistakes,’ even as it draws the viewer’s attention to the perceptual tension between the film’s actual surface and its represented depth.”

 

 

      My reaction of 2020 justifies my philosophical position when it comes to viewing cinema. If you are simply unable to talk about a specific film when you first view it, put it away or find another time to see it in the future. Think about it for a period of time—in this case four long years—and come back to it when you think you might be ready. What I found today was an absolutely delightful Carmen Miranda-like spoof played out in on a 16 mm Bell & Howell camera in what Ken Jacob described as one of his “Start Spangled to Death locations,” as Hoberman explains, “the rubble-strewn site of the future Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s west side.”

       The fact that this film uses as its set the very world already made famous in the 1957 Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story, using as a score Peter Duchin’s rhumba “Carinhoso” for its soundtrack, is an subject about which critics have generally kept quiet, but I would argue is crucial in comprehending just how ridiculously perverse Smith’s film is, given that one of the three male leads, climbing through the debris presumably on a chase of the two others, shot from an overhead position not uncommon in the later filmed version of West Side Story, wears a scarved headwrap in the manner of Carmen Miranda, a Brazilian as we know, but clearly standing in our confused white imaginations for  the Puerto Rico populations that had formerly lived in the houses whose rubble these three gay men are exaggeratedly exploring almost as if it were a jungle.

       The date of the original shooting, 1959, accordingly, is important, since two years before the movie version of West Side Story this ridiculously absurd short film inspired Smith to continue in filmmaking, producing in 1963, Flaming Creatures, yet another underground cinematic reinterpretation of variously overlaid film histories. Given the focus of the recent 2021 revision of West Side Story by Steven Spielberg, which focuses on the buildings soon under destruction, Smith’s deconstruction of this space becomes even more fascinating, scotch-tape intact in an attempt perhaps to piece together the fallen world it represents.

        Although generally listed as a film from 1962, the year in which it was formally released, for some inexplicably reason IMBd lists it as 1963, while I have included it as 1959 movie, the year it was shot, to provide some sense of how important this film was with regard to Smith’s later filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).