In Summer 1963, amidst the scandals and arrests that marked the earliest screenings of Flaming Creatures, avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith was already at work on his second movie, Normal Love. Andy Warhol, who’d just bought his first movie camera, was filming the first rolls of Sleep at his dealer Eleanor Ward’s rented farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
On the weekend of 11 August, Jack Smith and the cast of his new feature film-in-progress, Normal Love, also turned up [in Old Lyme]; they were there to film the Cake Sequence from Normal Love, in which the cast dances on top of a giant wooden birthday cake designed by Claes Oldenburg, which they constructed in a meadow on Ward’s property (figure 1). Warhol appeared in the Cake Sequence of Normal Love. that’s him on the right (figure 2), in the dark glasses; on the left, you can see poet Diane di Prima, in the turban, and Mario Montez to her right. And he also shot one of his very first films of this event, a four-minute silent color reel titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love,” probably on the same day.
In March 1964, as Robert Moses was orchestrating crackdowns and cleanups in advance of the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair, a NY Film-makers Cinematheque program was raided by police. NYPD seized the films and the projector, and arrested everyone down to the ticket taker. Among them was a print of Flaming Creatures and the original print of Warhol’s Normal Love making-of film. Which was never returned, and is considered lost.
These images and this account come from a 2009 lecture by Callie Angell on another unfinished Smith/Warhol collab, Batman/Dracula (1964). The lecture was adapted after Angell’s death into an essay for the journal Criticism, published in Spring 2014.
There’s so much so extraordinary going on here, it’s hard to know where to marvel first: at Claes Oldenburg making a giant birthday cake sculpture? for a Jack Smith film? at Eleanor Ward’s farm? which Andy Warhol also appeared in?
At Angell’s research and revelation of the almost apocryphal Batman/Dracula project? the miles of footage of which have not been processed and conserved? some hadn’t even been developed?? And so her screengrabs were the only accessible images of the pivotal project which, Angell argues, led to a bitter split between Warhol and Smith?
At the sheer scale and impact of all of Angell’s scholarship on Warhol’s films, from the grandest scope down to the frames and emulsion?
At the fraught history of Smith’s own archive, which was rescued over and over again—sometimes pulled from literal dumpsters—by last minute interventions of critics and friends? Only to be entangled and inaccessible for years by squabbling among indifferent heirs? And then to be extricated, ultimately, by being acquired, lock, stock & IP barrel, by Barbara Gladstone?
This is really how art history is formed and transmitted, preserved and lost. By a non-stop series of WTAF events and interventions.
“Batman and Dracula: The Collaborations of Andy Warhol and Jack Smith,” Callie Angell, Criticism, Spr 2014 [via jstor]