Cast

Tally Brown, Jerry Sims, Irving Rosenthal, Mario Montez, Doris Desmond

Film description

Jack Smith’s last 16mm feature – austerely black and white, more an exercise in sensibility than craft – evolved out of his November 1967 program, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight. The surviving version of No President alternates scenes shot at Plaster Foundation with found footage – including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip of an unidentified couple singing A Sunday Kind of Love, and newsreel footage of 1940 Republican candidate Wendell Willkie addressing the Future Farmers of America. The plot features the future presidential candidate (Irving Rosenthal) being abducted from his crib by a mustachioed pirate to be auctioned and sold on the block of a slave market. Smith’s hothouse childhood fantasies merge with entropic, harshly lit glamour scenes where the garishly costumed hobnob with the brazenly nude. As befits a political scenario, No President is rife with representations of the phallus-metaphoric and otherwise. Parker Tyler would hail No President as an even more daring exploitation of the themes in ‘Flaming Creatures’ and the Selection Committee for the newly-established Anthology Film Archives voted to include both in its canon of essential cinema.

J. Hoberman / Live Film! Jack Smith!