Flaming Creatures

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.

This is a short film recommended by the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die book, and this one was directed by the star of Blonde Cobra, Jack Smith. Smith was something of a character in the NYC underground art and film scene of the 50's and 60's. He was also an out and proud gay man, in both his life and art. Shot in black and white on over-exposed stock and using a lot of roving, soft focus close-ups, there's no plot at all here. It's just a lot of Smith's friends, mostly men with at least one or two women, in cheap, dime-store drag, posing and gyrating and laying in piles of each other on the floor. Oh, and there's a ton of graphic male and female nudity, and a lengthy sexual assault scene. This is rough, X-rated stuff, and I was rather stunned that it was on YouTube. This caused a lot of furor in the 60's, with multiple arrests as a result of its exhibition.

That notoriety may be a reason it's in the book, although some critics state that it has a "transcendent beauty". To me it was just self-indulgent garbage. It has also been posited that it's a precursor to the John Waters school of outrageous shock/camp. That may be, but Waters does that material much better. This runs 42 minutes, and only its brevity saved it from a 1/10 rating from me.

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.

US 43m, B&W Director: Jack Smith; Cast: Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez, Arnold Rockwood, Judith Malina, Marian Zazeela

Flaming Creatures is an often comedic sexually explicit experimental film which begins with an "advertisement" for lipstick which features close-ups of men and women applying lipstick adjacent male genitalia. Deemed "obscene" upon its release, Flaming Creatures is a surreal jumble of moving sexual images, often shot in close-up which serves to further confound the already sexually ambiguous participants, including a vampire in drag who rises from the coffin to the unlikely country vocal styling of Kitty Kallen and 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels". Irreverent and shocking, Flaming Creatures might be described as pop pornography, and along with the likes of Scorpio Rising (1964), inspired the films of Andy Warhol and John Waters (Klaus Ming July 2013).

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.