Faming Creatues is a legendary underground film, produced by Jack Smith and first shown at the Bleecker Street Cinema in April 1963. Frequently banned, the movie has been hard to see and remains probably impossible to access on a big screen. The WAC featured this film in October and November 2021 at its Benton Mediatheque, a sort of video juke box in the museum. But I wasn't able to see the movie on the Walker premises and watched it by on-line on the Walker Art Center website. Due to its subject matter, I would guess that the film is likely not available for a public screening even in an art gallery context. On various occasions, the movie has been seized by authorities and destroyed or simply locked away. Jonas Mekas once smuggled copies of the film out of harm's way. But, later, the movie's maker, Jack Smith, accused him of theft after the two underground movie-makers became enemies. Amos Vogel celebrates Flaming Creatures in the most extravagant terms in his well-known book Film as a Subversive Art. J. Hoberman, the Village Voice's movie critic wrote an entire book about the short 45 minute picture. (For a time, he was the film's de facto owner through the estate of Jack Smith who died in 1989 of AIDS-related pneumonia.)
So how does the film compare with the infamous glamor of its legend? First, the picture is literally hard to decipher -- the film stock is obviously distressed and has become even more scarred and illegible with time. The movie was made with a budget estimated at $300 (in 1963) and shot on discarded reels of army surplus Kodak film. The resulting images are grainy, frequently out of focus, and, often, over-exposed to the point of being blizzards of white swirling around shards of black shadow. Smith frequently uses extreme close-ups, particularly for the so-called "naughty bits" and so it is unclear whether we are seeing breasts or buttocks or just granular images of belly fat and elbows. A few limp penises flop around, sometimes wiggling disconsolately at the edge of the frame like fat, just excavated earthworms. (In a celebrated shot, a woman or transvestite with dark eye shadow and vampire lips and teeth glowers at the camera, a flaccid penis seemingly poised on her shoulder.) There are a couple of large, soft breasts, that are either cupped or wobbled by disembodied hands, some nipples shot as if through a microscope, and little patches of hair that could be either pubic or a hirsute underarm. Smith's camera is often tilted to extreme angles, foreshortening the action such as it is. Sometimes, he uses very fast cutting to create strobe-like effects with bleached bits of body and eyes and hair flickering in the image. On other occasions, he spins the camera or makes it tremble to simulate an earthquake or some other seismic disturbance on the set. The credits are hand-lettered in a sort of snaky calligraphy and, often, obscured by the profiles of performers standing in front of placards telling us who made (and performed in) the movie. It's my estimate that about a quarter of the picture can't be decoded -- it's just damaged abstract patterns of light and dark. The soundtrack consists of kitschy orchestral music, degraded tangos, and some rock and roll classics for which, undoubtedly, no legal rights were ever secured. (The rock 'n roll tunes give parts of the film the atmosphere of some of Kenneth Anger's avant garde pictures.) As far as I can tell, all of the action takes place on a single set dominated by huge vase, probably about four feet tall and vaguely Asian in character. A pale arrangement of flowers emerges from the top of the vase but the film's focus flattens the image so that the spray of blossoms appears on screen as an amorphous white nimbus above the vase, a kind of bright cloud that is otherwise not defined. At the heart of this aureole of blossoms, there's a skeletal crook of branch that reads on screen like a deformed black letter. A cage-shaped lantern hangs overhead and its bars and grid-shaped members seem to enclose and enfold some of the action when the camera is perched overhead to shoot through the thing -- sometimes, we see the cage-like lantern lying on the ground among the naked, exhausted performers. About every three minutes, Smith achieves a startlingly beautiful composition -- a tableaux of half-naked people splayed across the floor or a frieze of dancers, one of them thrusting her foot toward the focal plane so that it seems to protrude through the screen. In some shots, a single half-nude figure gesticulates over a pile of orgy-wearied actors. There are people in the film who are obviously women; penises to signify men, and a small mob of performers who seem to be transvestites or intersex. It's never immediately apparent whether we are looking at a beautiful woman or a man made up to resemble a beautiful woman or something in between.
The film starts with a blurred face and someone saying "Ali Baba comes today." There are titles and, then, we see what appears to be a haggard drag queen sniffing flowers. Some of this footage is shot through lace and looks a bit like von Sternberg's stylings for Marlene Dietrich. There follows an extended sequence that consists of close-ups of people smearing lipstick on their lips. (This part of the movie obviously has influenced Guy Madden and there are many shots that he has imitated in his films.) There is a voice-over that explains how to apply lipstick interspersed with questions such as "Does lipstick come off when you suck cock?" Close-ups of lipstick being applied begin with smooth features but morph into shots of bearded men smearing the lipstick on their lips.. Someone says that lipstick doesn't come off while sucking cock. "Not if its indelible," another voice replies. This sequence is followed by an extended rape scene. A woman, clearly visible as such because one of her breasts is exposed, he held down and raped by first one figure and, then, three -- she bares her teeth and seems to scream in distress. The rapists expose her pubic hair. She writhes and we can't tell whether she is enjoying the assault or resisting. Everything shakes and, perhaps, the lantern falls down. The rape footage reaches a climax of fast cutting so that the images become indecipherable. Then, we see the victim, still with her breast exposed, standing like a figure in a Greek tragedy over a heap of entangled bodies. The rape victim is consoled by another figure (possibly a transvestite) and the film luxuriates in blurry shots of flowers, jewels, petals, and heaps of chiffon drapery. An orgy follows with about six participants although there are no long shots or, even, medium shots to depict what is actually happening. The screen grows white with chiffon and silk and lace and we see insects, possibly flies or beetles burrowing through the fabric. This sequence is like something viewed through a microscope at high magnification with weird, dark, paramecium-like forms wriggling around. Another orgy seems underway, although at the edges of the frame with the camera focused on a box like a casket. The box's lid opens and a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe emerges and begins sucking blood from the throat of a man wearing an odd headdress. The vampire rolls her eyes back into her head so that in the sockets defined by eye-shadow we see only white. The soundtrack plays the song: "It wasn't God that made honky-tonk angels." Then, a woman dances with another figure. At first, this couple is shot vertically from directly above. Then, we see several other figures in the background, a gay man in tight white pants posturing for the camera and a flamenco dancer in black with a rose in her mouth and an odd figure of indeterminate sex wearing a sort of spangled fez. Gradually dancing figures fill the frame. Of course, we know this will end with an orgy on the floor since the ground is also covered with figures that are either writhing or comatose. An orgy does ensue scored to the tune of "Be-bop-a-lu-a she's my baby." Everyone ends up exhausted, lying with eyes rolled back in ecstasy on the floor. Someone lights a post-coital cigarette. We see a limp penis wiggling and, then, a breast wobbling and jiggling faster and faster and, then, a handwritten title tells us that this is "The End.".
The film was made when this kind of imagery was legally suspect and you could pay a real price for displaying transgressive pictures of this sort. Today every fourth-grader with a cell-phone has seen pictures much more explicit and, for that matter, easily interpreted -- nothing in Flaming Creatures can be seen clearly. When the movie was made sex was still linked somehow to glamor and the film's "flaming creatures" are movie stars -- it's been said that they are acting out the fantasies in which audiences invested the "flaming creatures" on the screen such as Jean Harlow or Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Rock Hudson or Clark Gable. The film seems archaic because, in large part, the link between glamor and the erotic has been irretrievably broken. The movie is like something found on a trash-heap (as Godard said about Weekend) irretrievably broken but still faintly intelligible if only as the memories of memories.
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