creatures afire
by Douglas Messerli
Jack Smith (director) Flaming Creatures / 1963
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.
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.
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 DeMille epics such as his 1949 Samson and Delilah,
Bible-tales turned into fantasylands for a world of displaced souls.
Los Angeles, November 13, 2009
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November
2009).
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