Flaming Creatures, by Constantine Verevis (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

At once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white-on-white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished, Flaming Creatures was something new under the sun. Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifact, he would still rank among the great visionaries of American film.

—J. Hoberman, On Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc (2001:10) Twenty years ago, while investigating films from the New American Cinema of the early 1960s, I came across the film work of Jack Smith: specifically, his early collaboration with Bob Fleischner and Ken Jacobs, Blonde Cobra (1959–1963), and the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963). I had the privilege of watching the films—16mm prints from Australia’s National Film and Video Lending Service—privately in S704, the dedicated screening room of the then Department of 1

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Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. I already knew (of) Smith’s films and writings from, among other places, the pages of Film Culture magazine, Jonas Mekas’s “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice, and Susan Sontag’s influential review article for The Nation, “A Feast for Open Eyes” (1964a). But nothing really prepared me for either the madman antics of Blonde Cobra or the aesthetic delirium that was and still is Flaming Creatures. From its extended opening sequence—dramatically underscored by a three-and-a-halfminute sound bite from the Maria Montez vehicle Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Lubin, 1944)—through the tableau of Francis Francine in white brocade turban and gown and Delicious Delores in black slip and floppy black hat, greeting one another against the backdrop of an oversize vase of luminous blossom, to the sounds of “Amapola” and on to the film’s final inspired burst of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and the lingering close-up of a jiggling breast, Flaming Creatures is an overwhelming experience filled with wonder and beauty.

Drawing upon ideas advanced in his aesthetic manifesto “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” (1962– 1963), Smith fashioned in Flaming Creatures the work of a cultist, a film that takes its inspiration from what he called the “secret-flix” of his youth—swashbuckling Spanish Galleon flix, exotic Dorothy Lamour sarong flix, Rio de Janeiro Production numbers, but (above all) the films of Universal Studio’s “Queen of Technicolor,” Maria Montez, and the camp appeal of her “spectacular, flaming image” (29). For me, it is Jack Smith’s cult sensibility, a fascination with the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of Hollywood exoticism, that marks out Flaming Creatures as a great work, a cult classic that shimmers—from the radical edge of the New York underground of the 1960s through to the Hollywood dream factory of the 1930s and on into the contemporary, postanalogue

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era—in all its marvelous materiality and unfathomable mystery.

Although reviled by some and banned as obscene in the state of New York soon after its first theatrical screenings, Flaming Creatures was for others—as with their encounters with Smith’s life work and personage—a life-changing (cinematic) experience. Smith’s patron and society favorite of the early 1960s, Isabel Eberstadt, recalled, “When I first saw Flaming Creatures, I felt I had found the person I had been looking for all my life. . . . When I saw Jack’s bunch of grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world” (1997:71). American playwright and avantgarde theater pioneer Richard Foreman said: “Just about the biggest aesthetic event of my whole life was when I first saw Flaming Creatures when it was first shown. I must have seen it twenty times in a row” (in Reisman 1990–1991:75). And, more recently, visual artist and curator Nayland Blake revealed: [The] two sides of my life—the art nerd and the homo— came together in 1976 when . . . I first saw Flaming Creatures at Anthology Film Archives. . . . I had been seeing whatever was shown there: Robert Breer animations, Paul Sharits flickers, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage—all of which fed [my] sense of superiority, of being in the know. But Flaming Creatures was an entirely different order of experience. . . . What was on the screen was at once intimate, ludicrous, and ravishingly beautiful . . . something that was fagotty, smart, and fun; something that left its mark on me—a message from Atlantis. (1997:170–73) On those occasions when I have arranged public screenings of Flaming Creatures—for instance, in the Audiovisions, B Is

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for Bad Cinema, and Controversies on Film series in 2001, 2008, and 20121—audiences have typically reacted to those aesthetic features of the work that mark it out as a cult movie: the poverty of its means, the generosity of its visual style, and the nature and extent of its aesthetic and moral transgressions. In their book Cult Cinema, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton identify Flaming Creatures as a key work in the development of cult film in and through the New York underground and midnight-movie circuit of the 1960s, describing it as “a transvestite bacchanalia . . . an attempt to mimic exotic Hollywood B-movies on a threadbare budget [that] embodies a kind of junk-shop glamour” (2011:160). Although the film’s trash aesthetic is central to its cult reputation, Mathijs and Sexton go on to argue that its controversial reception is just as essential in this regard, citing as evidence a reflection upon one of its first showings at the Bleecker Street Cinema: When the first show was over, a clique, a claque of six or so [viewers], back on the west side [of the theater] applauded. And I all alone east of the aisle up frontish applauded amid the numb and blind. Amid the tame I halted, oppressed by their inertia, paused, vacillated, considered for two beats of silence or three, before I clapped solo and thus no doubt branded myself a clappy pervert, crap happy degenerate, slobbering sadist, or even perhaps Jack Smith. Alone I applauded, and wondered who dreamed that I did just because the film was beautiful. So if you were there, reconsider. Fan the Flaming Creatures. They’re in the back of your eyes. You missed them when they were in front. (Kelman 1963:5; cf. Mathijs and Sexton 2011:160) This description—providing “the sense of a truly unique, forbidden experience” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:160)—not only 4

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communicates an essential aspect of Flaming Creatures’ cult reception but also marks out the film as a site of controversy and transgression that “violates law and morality [and passes] beyond any imposed limits” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:100).

Barry K. Grant refers to Flaming Creatures (and other films) in this way, arguing that transgression—at the level of content, in terms of attitude, and/or in a stylistic sense—is a quality central to the definition of all cult movies, especially “genuinely disturbing” works such as Flaming Creatures and Scorpio Rising (Anger, 1963) (1991:123, 131, 2000:16–17). Film showmen and critics Jack Stevenson (2003) and Jack Sargeant (1995) go even further, tracing a cultist trajectory of trash and transgression that extends from Flaming Creatures—“a Dionysian revelry [that] pictures various transgressive sexual acts and reaches its climax with a transvestite orgy and simultaneous earthquake” (Sargeant 1995:7)—to such exemplary works as George Kuchar’s Hold Me While I’m Naked (1964), John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), and Nick Zedd’s Geek Maggot Bingo (1983).

When Smith began shooting Flaming Creatures in the summer of 1962, he came to the film with an aesthetic vision already crafted through his work in still photography and his audio-visual collaborations with filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Bob Fleischner as well as performer Jerry Sims. In the late 1950s, Smith participated in the films of Jacobs and Fleischner and was sympathetic to their reflexive appropriation of popular culture and its potential for social and political critique. Smith appeared as the primary figure, “the Spirit Not of Life but of Living,” in Jacobs’s epic Star Spangled to Death ([1957–1959] 2003–2004) and worked with Fleischner and actor Sims on an abandoned film (or films), parts of which would ultimately become Blonde Cobra, the film title Smith derived from a favorite Marlene Dietrich–Josef von Sternberg picture, Blonde Venus (1932), and Montez’s film Cobra Woman (Siodmak, 5

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1944) (see Jacobs 1997b:162–63). Edited with additional footage by Jacobs, the completed work is described in its handpainted title cards as “a philm by Bobby Fleischner, with Jacky Smith” and features Smith, alternately posed in lounge suits and various exotic costumes, playing out a series of desperate antics and deranged routines. Consistent with Jacobs’s assessment of Smith’s “unlocatability as a person . . . a creature off the charts” (Jacobs 1997a:73, emphasis in the original), the portraits in Blonde Cobra include shifts and impersonations of several roles: not only the character of “Jack Smith,” but also Madame Nescience, Mother Superior, Sister Dexterity, and the Lonely Little Boy. These formless (and interrupted) visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack that juxtaposes snippets of movie music, news broadcasts, and confessions, some of which are played out against long stretches of black leader. Typical here are Smith’s outbursts of futility and despair, such as: “God is not dead. God is not dead. He’s just marvelously sick” and “Why shave when I can’t even think of a reason for living? Jack Smith. 1958. Sixth Street.”

In his seminal account of American underground film of the 1960s, Allegories of Cinema (1989), David E. James writes that Blonde Cobra is “a dialogue with the [Hollywood film] industry, a confession in extremis of belief in the popular movies of the thirties and forties. The interior mise en scène clearly derives from the Arabian/South seas Maria Montez movies . . . like Cobra Woman[,] of which it is a catastrophic remake” (125). Blonde Cobra is significant not only for the various formal strategies that anticipate Flaming Creatures— the hand-written titles, the cluttered sets and tight framing, the dress-ups and exotic costumes, the mix of Hollywood genres (musical, horror, film noir), the collage compilation soundtrack, even the shot of Smith reclined, the sole of his bare foot extended toward (baring his soul to) the camera— but also for the way its cult sensibility actively remakes and 6

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transforms the outmoded cultural products of the declining Hollywood studio system as objects of playful allusion, often invested with (gay) subcultural resonance. In accordance with Smith’s utopian vision and participant observation, the marvelous and the “exotic” become an appeal against the banal and the “normal” and function in the service of subversive cultural criticism. More than this, Flaming Creatures’ “moldy,” trash aesthetic and its willful technical crudity seems an extension of Blonde Cobra’s own “self-conscious negation” and immanent collapse: Blonde Cobra’s minimalism and meagerness, its aggressive imperfection, stand . . . as the recognition that the social permeation of commercial film [and its conservative ideology] is so total that non-commodity culture can only consist of the private reorganization of fragments of the mass cultural product, and the only response to the hegemony of the industrial practice capable of integrity is the denial of the medium itself. . . . Blonde Cobra looks like the worst film ever made; that is the condition of its excellence. (James 1989:127, emphasis added) For an underground filmmaker whose work has not circulated as widely as that of, say, Kenneth Anger, George Kuchar, and Andy Warhol (a factor that no doubt contributes to Flaming Creatures’ enduring cult reputation), the critical writing around Smith’s limited body of film work has been of an exceptionally high standard.2 In this book, I take up and develop an idea—briefly signaled elsewhere (Verevis 2006:151–52; Perkins and Verevis 2014:4–5)—that Smith’s works, Blonde Cobra and, more particularly, Flaming Creatures are catastrophic remakes of exotic Hollywood adventure movies and extravagant musicals, grounded in a cultist appreciation of a group of “secret-flix” 7

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and diva worship of Montez. In his seminal essay on Casablanca (Curtiz, 1941), Umberto Eco sees this type of intertextual quotation (and remaking) as a crucial element of cult films that contributes to their “glorious ricketiness” (1986:198).

Such a formulation does not, however, suggest that Flaming Creatures is a direct and conscious remake of any film or set of films in the manner, say, that Bec Stupak’s Flaming Creatures (Blind Remake) (2006) is a close retracing of Smith’s work. Rather, this approach more typically draws upon Marie Martin’s notion of the “secret remake” to consider Flaming Creatures as a type of cinematic rewriting in which a “source film [is] remade by a second film, which [by] employing a logic of condensation, displacement and figuration, brings out its latent or suppressed . . . quality” (2015:32).

Martin’s work takes up an idea already latent in Stephen Heath’s formulation that Nagisa Oshima’s film Empire of the Senses (Ai no korida, 1976) is a “direct and ruinous remake” of Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) (Heath 1981:146). This approach—more fully developed by Thierry Kuntzel (1980) in and through a close analysis of The Most Dangerous Game (Shoedsack and Pichel, 1932)— demonstrates that within the recurrence of sameness it is possible to measure the absolute difference that separates two texts. In turn, this methodology probably finds its fullest expression in Lesley Stern’s book The Scorsese Connection (1995), which persuasively demonstrates that the cinematic past returns in the films of Martin Scorsese not through any immediate connection to an earlier work or works, but as a series of “screen memories” that intersect, reflect, and reverberate. Smith himself admits that ideas are not transferred— directly remade—from the surface of a text, but move through a more indirect circuit: “I don’t go to the movies for the ideas that arise from [the] sensibleness of ideas. . . . Images evoke feelings and the ideas that are suggested by feeling” 8

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(1962–1963:31). In this respect, Jack Smith’s “secret remakes” are also not unlike the aesthetic of (ethnographic) surrealism that, as James Clifford describes it, takes up exotic fragments drawn from the (cinematic) unconscious and juxtaposes and rearranges them—remakes them through a process of duplicitous reflection—so as to reshuffle the order of “reality” and create the absolutely new (1988:118).

Like Blonde Cobra, Flaming Creatures can be described as “an accumulation of disparate fragments,” an “uncertain body,” or a set of uncertain bodies, always on the verge of collapse, of falling to pieces (Suárez 1996:197). If through the controversy of its public screenings in the 1960s it became “fixed” or captured by discourses of sex and censorship, art and aesthetics, then Smith’s strategy was to make his later works more resistant to such acts of containment. Smith’s interest in fragmentary, provisional texts becomes more and more pronounced in his subsequent film works circulating under various titles and in multiple versions—Normal Love (a.k.a. The Great Pasty Triumph, 1963–1964) and No President (a.k.a. The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie by the Love Bandit, 1967–1970). Throughout his stage performances in the 1970s, Smith constantly remade these earlier film works as performance reels, even developing a unique way of reediting them—removing the take-up reel during the actual screening—and resplicing the material into a spontaneous new arrangement. In addition, Smith’s surrealist method of fragmentation and juxtaposition—of “fortuitous collage” (Clifford 1988:132)—is extended, especially in the performance works, through recurring images of rubble, debris, and “human wreckage” (Suárez 1996:199). This junk—the dated artifacts of consumer culture, stripped of their functional context and rearranged—increasingly became the background for Smith’s films and performances, and he envisioned a city utopia organized around a giant, central junkyard: “I think this 9

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center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a center of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it” (in Lotringer 1978:199).

In his later work, it seems that Smith repeated a strategy—“a self-conscious negation so acute that it all but prevented his work from coming into being” (James 1989:126)—that reached back to Flaming Creatures and, before that, to Blonde Cobra. In his early collaboration with Jacobs, Smith had already turned on to the naive moldiness that informs Flaming Creatures, and with that he seemed to suggest that it was only through artifice—only through inept approximation—that the world could be transformed, that the creature could be created anew. In later work, Smith cast himself as Donald Flamingo and Sinbad Glick, but as the “Blonde Cobra” he had already turned attention away from identity toward personage—a kind of anthology of the self that invests in the symbolic richness of (cinematic) figures and the relationship between them. With these works, Smith seemed to accept a documentary “rule of public comportment,” but then, by pushing this rule to its limit, he exposed the entire proceeding as just another “ruse of a subjectivity in process,” one that was forever making and remaking itself (Clifford 1988:172). In this way, Smith narrated (or, better, refused to narrate) scraps of existence—he gave “public form to personal experiences without betraying their peculiar lived authenticity” (Clifford 1988:167, emphasis added). Smith thus created as objective and sincere a document as possible, but one that refused to present itself as an expression of a selfrevelatory subject. That is, Jack Smith defended a rigorous subjectivity by leaving the document—Blonde Cobra, Flaming Creatures, the life work—open to objective chance by transcribing and transforming and remaking “the boring, the passionate, the interesting, the unexpected, the banal,” the pasty and the moldy (Clifford 1988:168).

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This book proceeds by first outlining in chapter 1 the background to Smith’s filmmaking and the “low-rent” circumstances of the production of Flaming Creatures over the summer and autumn of 1962. Chapter 2 describes the reaction to the initial distribution and public screenings of the film, the ensuing controversy and the subsequent banning of the film in the state of New York, and the film’s more recent gay subcultural uptake and reevaluation. Chapter 3 breaks the circular movement of Flaming Creatures into three components— presentation, devastation, stimulation—to provide a detailed description and textual analysis of the film, including an investigation of such topics as nostalgia and cultism, trash and transgression, failure and despair. The fourth and final chapter considers the legacy of Flaming Creatures, Smith’s trash aesthetic and life work in the period immediately following his death in 1989 and into the first decades of the new millennium. In combination, all four chapters explore the various ways in which Flaming Creatures’ tawdry exoticism, transgressive attitude, and coverage of gay subcultures contribute to its cult-film credentials and reputation.

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C U LTO G R A P H I E S

Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, and providing an in-depth reading of the film itself, Constantine Verevis argues that Flaming Creatures embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted, multimedia artistic work with fragments of the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

“Verevis dissects and maps with great affection the tangled network of intertextual appropriations Jack Smith performed in his landmark film. A feast of historical and filmic information.”

JANET STAIGER , author of Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception CONSTANTINE VEREVIS is associate professor of film and screen studies at Monash University. He is the author of Film Remakes (2006) and coeditor of B Is for Bad Cinema (2014), among many other titles.

C U L T O G R A P H I E S is dedicated to the weird and wonderful world of cult cinema. This series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films that have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed, and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape.

Cover image: Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures , 1962–63, film still from 16mm black and white release print. © Jack Smith Archive. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

ISBN: 978-0-231-19147-0

WALLFLOWER PRESS 9 780231 191470