Member-only story
Appreciating contemporary art
The Art of Jakob Zaaiman: Exploring the difficult and the disturbing
Commercial art for the transgressive and deranged: thank you Andy Warhol !
As a boy I remember being deeply unsettled by the posters and lobby stills for a sci-fi disaster film that was showing at a local bug house. The title alone was enough to scare me, and the mystifying stills pointed towards some kind of inexplicable horror. The film had an age restriction — thank God — so the closest I could get to its content were the teaser pictures. And the fact that it was showing at a disreputable bug house — outside of the mainstream — actually increased my anxiety rather than reduced it, because it was as if ‘decent responsible people’ were ignoring the frightening ideas being portrayed, and pretending they didn’t exist, rather than confronting them.
The film was ‘Crack in the World’ (1965), and in my pre-adolescent mind I understood all films to be semi-documentaries, and if not a hundred percent accurate, then as close to reality as to be indistinguishable from it. That the world could crack in half — as depicted on the poster — really worried me, and I tried to ‘work out’, from the ‘evidence’ what the film was about, and how the people in it were going to be able to reverse this…
