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EDITORIAL
On March 3rd, Jack Smith’s film, Flaming Creatures, was seized at the New Bowery Theatre in New York by detectives from the District Attorney’s Office. Film-makers Ken Jacobs and Jonas Mekas were arrested. On March 7th, Kenneth Anger’s film, Scorpio Rising, was seized by the Los Angeles vice squad at the Cinema Theatre in L.A. On March 13th, Jean Genet’s film, Un Chant d’Amour, was seized by the New York police at the Writer’s Stage in New York. Jonas Mekas was arrested again. In all three cases the charge was “obscenity.”
Released on bail, after being arrested for screening Flaming Creatures, Jonas Mekas projected Genet’s film, Un Chant d’Amour, risking a second arrest. In a public statement, issued before showing the film, he explained his position in the text that follows:
Like Flaming Creatures, the Genet film, Un Chant d’Amour, is a work or art and like any work of art it is above obscenity and pornography, or, more correctly, above what the police understand as obscenity and pornography. Art exists on a higher spiritual, aesthetic and moral plane.
The new American film-maker does not believe in legal restrictions placed upon works of art; he doesn’t believe in licensing or any form of censorship. There may be a need for licensing guns and dogs, but not for works of art.
Likewise, we refuse to hide our work in restricted film societies, private clubs and membership groups. Our art is for all the people. It must be open and available to anybody who wants to see it.
The existing laws are driving art underground.
We refuse to accept the authority of the police: to pass judgment on what is art and what is not art; what is obscenity and what is not obscenity in art. On this subject we would rather trust D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller than the police or any civic Official. No legal body can act as an art critic.
There is an image in the minds of the people that cinema is only entertainment and business. What we are saying is that cinema is also art. And the meanings and values of art are not decided in courts or prisons.
Art is concerned with the spirit of man, with the subconscious of man, with the aesthetic needs of man, with the entire past and future of man’s soul. Like any other art, like painting, music or poetry, our art cannot be licensed or censored. There is no one among us to judge it. We have not only the Constitutional right but, more important, the moral right, to communicate our work to other people.
To consider Flaming Creatures or Un Chant d’ Amour obscene by a few extracted images, taken out of context, and to make a criminal case thereof, without making an attempt to understand the work as a whole, or the true meaning of the
FILM CULTURE 1