Constantine Verevis - Flaming Creatures

CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a series of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The 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.

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FLAMING CREATURES

Constantine Verevis

WALLFLOWER PRESS

NEW YORK

A Wallflower Book

Published by

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2020 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85130-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Verevis, Constantine, author.

Title: Flaming creatures / Constantine Verevis.

Description: London ; New York : Wallflower Press, 2019. | Series: Cultographies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025481 (print) | LCCN 2019025482 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231191470 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Flaming creatures (Motion picture) | Experimental filmsHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1997.F54 V47 2019 (print) | LCC PN1997.F54 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/72dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025481

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025482

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Series design by Elsa Mathern

Cover image: Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures , 196263, film still from 16mm black and white release print.

Jack Smith Archive. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

CONTENTS

Long in formationwith enough false starts and delays to have made even Jack Smith sit up and take noticethe idea for a book on Flaming Creatures goes back at least ten years, and some thanks are now in order.

First, thanks to Cultographies series founding editors Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton for initially inviting me to contribute to the series, to Wallflower Press commissioning editor Yoram Allon for contracting the work, and to Ryan Groendyk and his team at Columbia University Press for taking over and seeing the book through to its completion.

My thanks also go to Ann Restak and Miciah Hussey at the Gladstone Gallery in New York for the assistance they provided while I was conducting preliminary research at the Jack Smith Archive in April 2010.

Thanks also to Ernest Mathijs, Nicholas Rombes, and Janet Staiger for providing feedback on the initial book proposal and more recently to my friends and colleaguesAdrian Danks, Claire Perkins, Dana Polan, Iain Smith, and Deane Williamsfor looking over full drafts and providing valuable suggestions, many of which have found their way into the final document. Thanks, similarly, to Columbia University Presss two anonymous readers for helpful comments that contributed to the shape and detail of the work.

Finally, this bookwhich is for creatures everywhereis dedicated to Zoi and Mia.

May you rage and flame.

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 Smiths 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 (19591963), and the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963). I had the privilege of watching the films16mm prints from Australias National Film and Video Lending Serviceprivately in S704, the dedicated screening room of the then Department of Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. I already knew (of) Smiths films and writings from, among other places, the pages of Film Culture magazine, Jonas Mekass Movie Journal column in the Village Voice , and Susan Sontags 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 sequencedramatically underscored by a three-and-a-half-minute 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 films 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 (19621963), 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 youthswashbuckling Spanish Galleon flix, exotic Dorothy Lamour sarong flix, Rio de Janeiro Production numbers, but (above all) the films of Universal Studios Queen of Technicolor, Maria Montez, and the camp appeal of her spectacular, flaming image (29). For me, it is Jack Smiths 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 shimmersfrom 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 erain 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 othersas with their encounters with Smiths life work and personagea life-changing (cinematic) experience. Smiths 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 Jacks bunch of grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world (1997:71). American playwright and avant-garde 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 19901991:75). And, more recently, visual artist and curator Nayland Blake revealed: