Normal Love (1963) A film by JACK SMITH. Colour, Sound, 16mm, 103 mins

What does it look like when a Mummy, a Cobra Woman, a Drag Queen and other Creatures get together in Atlantis? Welcome to American underground artist Jack Smith’s fantasy world. Working across film, performance and photography, Jack Smith is best known for his film “Flaming Creatures”, a film famously banned for its depiction of sexual and homoerotic content deemed as having “no socially redeeming value”.

In the summer of 1963, Jack Smith set off for the summer to create what he described as a ‘pasty‘ coloured film: Normal Love. Casting his friends and entourage as protagonists in their own fantasy-reality, Normal Love unravels a colourful, extravagant Utopia or “Atlantis” as Jack Smith would say. Part documentary, Normal Love records the free-spirited performance and imagination of a motley crue of characters including Smith himself (as some kind of magician), the seductive Cobra Woman, Mongolian Child, the Mummy and other ‘exotic creatures‘, as Smith said.

The only screening method possible for Normal Love was if Smith came along with the film himself. After the banning of Flaming Creatures, JACK SMITH resolved to never make a movie again that could not be seen by his friends. Smith’s radical idea was to never again create a finished object, so as to ensure that it can never be seized or taken away from him. It was something of a personal rebellion against the establishment and capitalist commodification of art. ‘I want to be uncommercial film personified‘, as Smith said. Filmmakers such as JONAS MEKAS and GEORGE KUCHAR recall screenings of Normal Love with Smith in the projection room, splicing the film as it ran, in what Lucas calls ‘a jumbled mess…even though the pictures themselves were flowing beautifully‘.

Master Italian filmmaker FREDERICO FELLINI notably praised Normal Love and counted the film amongst his influences, strongly felt in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969).

‘I want to be uncommercial film personified‘, said American underground artist Jack Smith.

Also check out this documentary portrait in The Third Eye’s Cinema: Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis.

Text by Sophie Pinchetti