creatures afire
by Douglas Messerli
Jack
Smith Flaming Creatures / 1963 / The
screening I saw was presented with a talk by J. Hoberman at The Roy and Edna
Disney/CalArts Theatrer (Redcat) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 9,
2009.
For years I'd been hearing about the
sensational film Flaming Creatures
which seemingly influenced filmmakers and dramatists from Andy Warhol, John
Waters, and Federico Fellini to Cindy Sherman and Richard Foreman.
From the beginning, after its New Bowery Theater showing in 1964,
screenings were rare, and in the late 1960s Smith took the film out of
circulation. For all these years, accordingly, I had been seeking an
opportunity to attend a rare showing, and despite the fact that I was scheduled
to teach a literature course on November 9th, I arranged from the first day of
class that we would skip the week in question.
Listening to J. Hoberman's historical recounting of the film, which was
deemed pornographic on its release and was denounced in the media and even in
the halls of congress (one congressman being outraged that it was not even
being good pornography (evidently he
couldn't get an erection"), it is difficult not to let out a hoot of
laughter.
Indeed, in today's world, Smith's orgiastic figures of mostly gays and
transvestites seems almost innocent. Yes, from time to time, one or another
shakes a flaccid penis in the camera's face, but, for the most part, the
figures of this pastiche of scenes and music reminiscing from Maria Montez to
Josef Von Sternberg's films and numerous other popular cultural references,
seems utterly innocent. Hoberman himself describes the film in those terms:
Flaming Creatures' forty-five washed out, dated minutes
depict a place where a cast of tacky transvestites and other
terminal types (some costumed as recognizable genre
faves—a Spanish dancer, a vampire, an exotic temptress),
accompanied by recordings of popular music, shrieks, and
snatches of Hollywood soundtracks ("Ali Baba is coming!
Ali Baba is coming!") dance, grope, stare, posture, and wave
their penises with childlike joy. The marriage
of Heaven and Hell presented with playful depravity.
Clearly, however, there is something comical about the full throttle
simmering of this heap of human flesh at the center of the short film. And yet,
it is a haunted, ghostly world left behind by the cheap and gaudy reality that
Hollywood directors have awarded us as alternative spaces in which to exist.
And in that sense Flaming Creatures
is an inevitable product of filmmaking itself. In a strange way this silly,
tawdry, outrageous depiction of a hopped-up bacchanalia is no more or less
unbelievable than hundreds of scenes from Cecil De Mille epics such as his 1949
Samson and Delilah, Bible-tales
turned into fantasylands for a world of displaced souls.
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009).
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