Cast

Mario Montez, Diane DePrima, John Vaccaro, Beverly Grant, Tiny Tim

Film description

Normal Love is supposed to be for Smith a kind of ‘commercial’ sequel of Flaming Creatures realised thanks to the support and pushing of Jonas Mekas, who was delighted with the artist’s first film. Mekas, after watching material from a working version of Normal Love compared it to works of Rubens, Monet or One Thousand and One Nights. Intensive, rich colours, exotic music, and lush flora create a garden of imagination in which live characters from classic horrors from the 1930s, plastic monsters, muslin mermaids and wanton fairies. Stars from American underground from the 1960s – Mario Montez, Tiny Tim, Diane DePrima, Beverly Grant and Andy Warhol – play the inhabitants of this world.

Jack Smith never ended the process of creating Normal Love; he re-directed the version from 1963 numerous times. Subsequent shows differed in structure, music background, playback pace, sometimes becoming epic poems that lasted for several hours. The reconstruction of Jerry Tartagli is a presentation of the original material based on notes which Smith prepared to the never completed soundtrack of Tony Conrad.

prepared by Grzegorz Kurek, based on the text of J. Hoberman