Flaming Creatures

Film is serious business, but useful in so, so many ways.

One way is as a path to discover who people are, which is why, I think, movies are such popular date activities. I mean, on the face of it, you are two isolated souls in the theater. The bonding comes in how you share the experience.

You can tell a great deal about your future lover by discovering what sort of comedy he/she penetrates.

The next step will be the arts and perversion. Not what he or she considers perverted — that's uninteresting, where the line is. But once you cross over, you move into territory that has artists here and there forming things that may have merit.

So if you are serious about your partner, and serious about a life in film, you'll drudge through many of these "experimental" films. Some will stick and some not.

Some, like this, rely on the casual and accidental while referencing "old" art. Perversion in several dimensions, adding to enchantment, or so it is intended.

Whether this is one you will use is a matter too personal for me to fathom. But for my taste, it tries too hard in the wrong directions. Perhaps in the 60s it was useful to just fart loudly and musically for the effect. But those days are past. If you want one to look at after this, try one of Derek Jarman's little films from the 70s.

Oh shucks. I was going to recommend one but I see that some unappreciative reader has arranged to have all my comments of those removed. You can see them as extras on the DVD of "The Tempest," which is suggested viewing in any case.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Somewhere in between the poetic and manic lies "Flaming Creatures", Jack Smith's infamously odd avant garde classic. I find this to be a movie that is very difficult to rate because it really isn't a typical movie. Even for experimental underground cinema, it comes across as really weird and unsettling.

The first half is easily the highlight. The notorious "rape" sequence is one of the most f*cking crazy and disturbing scenes I have ever witnessed. The chaotic atmosphere is only boosted by Smith's drunkenly soaring camera, capturing the ear piercing shrieking of the film's "creatures".

The second half is less compelling, but still interesting. It is the much more positive and comical half, as the "creatures" joyously dance with one another behind old pop music. It is entertaining and amusing to an extent, despite dragging on a bit.

Most people probably will not enjoy this little oddity nearly as much as I have, which is totally okay. This movie is so damn bizarre, graphic, unsettling, confusing, and chaotic that it is almost surprising that ANYONE could appreciate it that is not mentally ill. However, I did manage to find much within Jack Smith's mad masterpiece to adore.

Jack Smith's 1963 short Flaming Creatures might be one of the most sexual perverse film ever made. It has ever amount of sexual deviance that made up the New York underground in the 1960's- transexuals, S&M, lines such as "do they make a lipstick that doesn't come off when you s*** c****?", drug use, and a radically innovative orgy scene that plays more like a Greek tragedy than a work of pornography. On the surface, Flaming Creatures appears to be art at its lowest, but a closer examination of the film proves that Flaming Creatures is not only high art, but a siminal piece of film in the cannon of The New American Cinema. Filmed on top of Smith's New York studio on a basic 16mm camera, Flaming Creatures embodies the true independent spirit of The New American Cinema. The orgy scene in the film is perhaps the greatest combination of art and film. The "creatures", as Smith puts them, engage in a rape-orgy scene of sailors and a transexual. The orgy plays like a tragic meeting the old America with the freshly birthed new morality in America. What is even more remarkable is the "earthquake", caused Smith's shaking camera at the end of the orgy. It as if the world is opening up on Smith's creatures and swallowing them and all their perversions. No one can deny that Flaming Creatures is a difficult film to watch- both in its content and deep artistic meanings, but the spirit of the film is the reason it should be preserved for generations to come.

His own performance style--half dashing, half mongoloid--is better preserved in the Jack Smith routine that caps off Andy Warhol's CAMP: the great man, looking dapper as a Lower East Side Clark Gable, does a ten-minute performance piece about, literally, coming out of a closet. And the late, great Ron Vawter's extraordinary "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith" preserves the molasses, the stupor, and the head-thumping epiphanies that made up a live Jack Smith performance.

CREATURES, one of the most notorious of all American "avant-garde films," seems at first to be a queer-theory seminar avant la lettre. Then Smith's processional of silent-movie-looking waifs and queenies repeats and repeats. I find George Kuchar and even Kenneth Anger more interesting on similar territory; but Smith is a man-god, and CREATURES should be seen...once.

Funny story about how this movie was loved by police forces in the 60s is much better than movie. Enormous tons of drag, bizarre scenes of sex, lots of dancing... In 42 minutes it's easy to feel a bore just to watch this stuff. Of course a long time ago this would be very shocking for public who grew up on Leave It To Beaver or The Honeymooners. But today...

Today homosexual people can marry each other, drag can't surpirse anyone and avant-garde filmmakers make better pictures. Seeing this today is like see a very old home movie made by crazy psychopats who never knew better things to do with 300$.

So, is this movie can make you change your opinion about sex or sexuality? You can be that stupid asking questions like this. It never tries and you should never try to watch this.