Film - The Aesthetics of Decay: Jack Smith and Dick Higgins’ New York

Scotch Tape (Jack Smith, 1959-62, US, 16mm, 3 min.);The Flaming City (Dick Higgins, 1963, US, 16mm, 121 min.)

Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape and Dick Higgins’ rarely seen 1963 epic The Flaming Cityare experimental takes on the beauty and transformative potential of urban ruin and rubble. Both set in New York in the early 1960s, these playful and transgressive portraits of the city envision it as a metropolitan playground in which detritus and decay possess transformative potential. Higgins described The Flaming City as “an anti-semantic love story about a marvelous part of New York City and the people who lived there as the city is destroyed.”

Introduced by Professor Hannah Higgins, University of Illinois at Chicago.

More information here: http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/visit/come-to-an-event.html#sthash.muSUbhX4.dpuf