Flaming Creatures

The Psychotronic Zone

By Jonathon Saia

Flaming Creatures (1963, USA) – Director: Jack Smith. Writer: Jack Smith. Stars: Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez, Arnold Rockwood, Judith Malina, Marian Zazeela, Beverly Grant & Piero Heliczer. B&W, 45 minutes.

This was the film that put Jack Smith on the map, much to his own chagrin.

Flaming Creatures was made over a period of eight weekend afternoons in the late summer and early fall of 1962 on the rooftop of the Windsor Theatre in New York City. The film cost $300 and used a variety of Jack’s friends, most of whom were rumored to have been high on cocaine, meth, or pot during filming; which when you see the film you can understand why.

In breaking with tradition from my usual format, my discussion of Flaming Creatures will rest less on a play by play analysis and more on the overall look, feel, and take away one gets from the film. Any “analysis” of Flaming Creatures (or most of Jack Smith’s work for that matter) I believe misses the point entirely; as Susan Sontag said, “There are no ideas, no symbols, no commentary on or critique of anything in Flaming Creatures. Smith’s film is strictly a treat for the senses.” Moreover, the aftermath of the film’s release and the effect it had on Jack’s career fascinate me (and I hope the reader) more than the film itself.

Flaming Creatures is a plotless series of tableaux, not unlike his photography, that celebrate the exotic aesthetic of Arabia (including a portion of the soundtrack from his muse Maria Montez’s 1944 film, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) while pushing sexuality – more specifically transvestism – and male nudity to the foreground; incredibly forbidden and shocking elements for the time (and sadly still today…) as we shall see.

In establishing Smith’s eventual modus operandi of keeping an audience waiting, the credit sequence lasts an endless three and a half minutes, repeating title cards and intercutting flaccid penises and indistinguishable other body parts for good measure. Transvestites (Transsexuals? Drag queens?) fan each other. Men and women put on lipstick; “Is there a lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cock?” Jack Smith intones on the soundtrack. More shots of flaccid penises and swollen breasts. An elongated rape scene in where women are groped and their genitals are eaten and digitally inserted by the transvestites. A drag queen vampire that looks like Marilyn Monroe rises from a coffin. Men in dresses dance with one another. Mario Montez (yet another cross-dressing male, this one taking a moniker that mirrors Jack’s goddess) dances in full Spanish garb.

Jack saw the film as a comedy about a haunted movie studio. The title is a reference to the fleeting and ephemeral nature of stardom; how movie stars “flame out” within five years, the approximate length of Maria Montez’s career in Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe also died during the filming of Flaming Creatures so it is no accident that the vampire looks like her.

The title could also be a reference to the film’s inherent queerness. The consensus view of homosexuals in the 1960s was that we were trash (there’s that word again), replaceable, to be discarded, “creatures” that would be better off “flaming out” into nothingness. The film is Jack’s world in where a group of mostly queer people have created their own space; a place they feel safe to enact their most taboo fantasies.

“After Flaming Creatures, I realized that that wasn’t something I had photographed: Everything really happened. It really happened. Those were things I wanted to happen in my life and it wasn’t something that we did, we really lived through it; you know what I mean? It just was almost incidental that there was a camera around. In other words, if it had happened before the camera was invented, it would have gone on much the same way it did.”

When Flaming Creatures was released alongside Blonde Cobra in 1963 by the Film-maker’s Cooperative in New York City (a distribution company ran by Jonas Mekas that released films that “made the censors blushed”), it set off a firestorm of passionate praise and hatred: Mekas himself called it ”so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies”; while critic Arthur Knight of The Saturday Review called it, “a faggoty stag-reel...as close to hardcore pornography as anything ever presented in a theater.”

Flaming Creatures was by far not the first film to deal with overt nudity nor was it the only contemporaneous film to do so: The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, featuring Jack himself, had copious amounts of nudity; Stan Brakhage’s films Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961) showed the births of Brakhage’s children, complete with graphic, vaginal footage; while Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963, made in homage to Flaming Creatures) and Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses (1964) show their female filmmakers having sex.

Nor was it the first film to deal with cross-dressing, male nudity, or homosexuality. Nor was Jack the only homosexual director working within the underground and avant-garde scene: Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950) was not only blatantly homoerotic, but showed erect penises. Gregory Markopoulus’ Swain (1950) heavily alluded to homosexual desire. Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? (1953) called for sympathy for transvestites and transsexuals. And of course the work of Kenneth Anger, particularly his seminal films, Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1964) grappled with homosexual and homoerotic longing.

But what was new about Flaming Creatures is that it added humor and joy to queer images. The above queer films are essentially cautionary tales or deal with homosexuality in a way that makes it something to analyze or give one pause. Flaming Creatures treats its queerness and male nudity without fanfare or analysis; a grave sin for the time. To see the film today, in the aftermath of things such as Pink Flamingos (1972), Salo (1975) or even mainstream cable television, Flaming Creatures is extremely quaint. But in 1963 – six years before Stonewall, eleven years before the Deep Throat trial, and twenty-one years before Falwell vs. Flynt – New York City, a place hellbent on cleaning up its image in time for the World’s Fair of 1964, began to crack down on “obscene” materials. And not just plain old obscene, but obscene and unashamedly queer.

Flaming Creatures – and other films distributed by Mekas’ Co-op – was never submitted to the New York Board of Censors; therefore, they legally could not charge admission for showings. Mekas skirted this by soliciting donations instead. However, when word got out to the Bureau of Licenses at the “offensive” nature of Flaming Creatures, they put the pressure on theatre owners to refuse bookings. At one viewing at the Tivoli, which was in conjunction with an award being given to Smith by Mekas, the police had to evacuate the ticket holders out when they refused to leave upon management’s decision to shut down the film. In Belgium at a film festival, when the board refused to have screenings of Flaming Creatures, Mekas threatened to pull the other films he was representing from the festival; later, he and his cohort, filmmaker Barbara Rubin, snuck the film into a canister of Warhol’s Sleep (1964), and projected it on to the face of the Minister of Justice during a riot. The following month, when Mekas showed Flaming Creatures in conjunction with footage from Smith’s new film, Normal Love (1963-1964) at the Bowery Theatre in NYC, the films were seized and Mekas, Ken Jacobs (who was projecting the film), and Florence Karpf (Jacobs’ girlfriend and the ticket taker for the evening) were arrested. They served sixty days in jail. The film was officially deemed obscene by the courts; the United States Supreme Court denied an appeal and to this day, Flaming Creatures is still technically “obscene” in New York City.

One person that did not expect the hullabaloo was Jack Smith himself. He saw it as a light comedy not some grand statement of sexual liberation or celebration of homosexual expression. What is most shocking – and telling about Jack’s personality, intentions, and artistic “integrity – is his subsequent relationship toward Jonas Mekas. By all accounts, here was a man that championed his work, paying for film stock and printing costs, and loaning him his Bolex to make Normal Love. He heralded Flaming Creatures in print and in person, even going to jail for the right to show it. Jack saw Mekas as an opportunist, clinging to the controversy of his film to make a name for himself. When Smith was barred from being at Mekas’ trial by Mekas’ lawyer (presumably afraid Jack would do or say something to jeopardize the case), Jack blamed Jonas. But his greatest grievance was that he felt that Mekas commodified his art.

When asked about the “meaning” of Flaming Creatures years later by a journalist, Jack responded: “The meaning has to come out in what is done with the art…the way my movie was used – that was the meaning of the movie. What you do with it economically is what the meaning is. If it goes to support Uncle Fishook [Mekas], that’s what it means. Movies are always made for an audience. But I didn’t make it that way. I was just making it completely for myself. At the time, that seemed like an intellectual experiment. But that point got lost…I turned over my film to this film co-op. And then it became a grotesque parody of Hollywood.”

What is glorious about Flaming Creatures is its ever changing perspective of horizon. Like Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1958), the camera spins and pans across piles of bodies; the audience ever unsure who, what, where (and sometimes why) they are seeing. What is maddening about Flaming Creatures is its (seeming) lack of construction. While some elements and scenes seem deliberate, others seem spliced at random; a technique that would later become a crucial part of his live performances. However, the general feeling one gets from watching Flaming Creatures is that you are getting away with something. That you are let into a secret world. You may not understand what is there, you may not like what you see, and you may want to leave for a myriad of reasons, but it is definitely a place like no other.