HomeOWEN'S BESTS
7. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Jack Smith was a one-man counterculture
whose haunting experimental film Flaming
Creatures helped invent the 1960s. The beauty,
and audacity, of Mary Jordan's great documentary is
that it shows you how Smith, with a purity that crossed
over into martyrdom, turned his scavenging, pansexual,
thrift-shop life into a holy work of art. Jordan puts
together Smith's films, performances, and cracked oxymoron
of a personality — imagine a Greek statue that
talked like Eeyore — into a collage more moving than the
sum of its parts. She has made an elegy for a lost age, and
for a man who now looks like the messiah of bohemia.
The Best & Worst of 2007
The year that was: Our choices -- and yours -- for the highs and lows in pop culture
Mike Sullivan
