JACK SMITH | SHADOWS IN THE CITY [1991] Photo

[New York: Np, 1991]. Vintage original 10 x 8″ (25 x 20 cm) black-and-white photo. Fine.

A portrait of Jack Smith (who was slowly dying of AIDS, to which he would soon succumb) in his last film appearance.

“A story of suicidal obsession, conceived as a work of ‘contemporary horror’, Shadows in the City was the last major work of New York’s 1980s No Wave film scene. Shot over seven years in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, painter-performer Ari Roussimoff’s only fiction feature captures the urban desolation of the city in the decade before gentrification. This definitive work of ‘outsider cinema’ boasts a who’s who of local cult figures, including Bruce Byron (star of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising), Taylor Mead, Annie Sprinkle, Joe Coleman, Nick Zedd, Kembra Pfahler, Valerie Caris, Catfish Hayes, Clayton Patterson, the Hell’s Angels, and, in their final screen appearances, Jack Smith and documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio.

“Heavily influenced by the German Expressionist films Roussimoff saw at MoMA and in repertory screenings in the 1960s and ’70s, Shadows is a strung-out mashup of noir art film, Neorealism, and the carnivalesque that plays out in a series of scripted and improvised scenes. Upon its release, the Russian-born Roussimoff was dubbed ‘dean of the disenfranchised’ by the underground press, with Downtown magazine describing Shadows as a ‘combination dagger-in-the heart and pie-in-the face of the official counter culture.’ The film’s documentation of New York’s physical and cultural landscapes of the 1980s is more arresting now than ever.” (www.moma.org/calendar/film/5630)