“So, Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even though they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally — he lived in a visual world. The explanation plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. His expression was of the erotic realm — the neurotic gothic deviated sex-colored world and it was a turning out of himself and magnificent.”
— Jack Smith on the cinema of Josef Von Sternberg
When Jack Smith’s legendary avant-garde film Flaming Creatures was first shown in 1963, it was known mainly (if it was known at all) as an incendiary, scandalous work which led to the public arrest of its exhibitors and to a landmark obscenity trial. The film evokes a non-narrative orgy in its parade of flaccid penises, bouncing breasts, and (at various intervals) depictions of both violent assault and celebratory pleasure. Though it was quickly held up by its defenders as an emblem of the total freedom of underground cinema, it was regarded by its creator (somewhat perversely) as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” When Psycho was first released three years earlier, Hitchcock unexpectedly called that film a comedy too, but surely Hitch was being facetious: Psycho is one of the most profoundly disturbing and morally serious films ever made in Hollywood. But was Smith being cheeky as well in his description? I wouldn’t say so. Flaming Creatures’ comic, child-like, even utopian aspects are embodied in its relationship with Hollywood cinema, and specifically in its evocation of such exoticist items as the Sternberg-Dietrich films of the 1930s.
Jack Smith was hardly the first avant-garde filmmaker to incorporate aspects of American popular art into his films: in the same year (1963), Kenneth Anger filled the soundtrack of his own fetishistic Scorpio Rising with contemporary pop songs by the likes of Ricky Nelson, The Angels, and Elvis Presley. And one of the most famous early examples of the American avant-garde cinema was Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), a collage film composed of shots from the eponymous actress’s performance in George Melford’s now-forgotten East of Borneo (1931). So, this idolization of the diva and of Hollywood’s glamour had been at least one of this movement’s threads since its inception.
But what sets Flaming Creatures apart from these earlier examples is its sincerity; rather than treating Hollywood iconography as an object of condescension or kitsch, Smith clearly loved this body of work, as evidenced in the above quote espousing his feelings toward Von Sternberg. Flaming Creatures seems to revel in the giddy act of dressing up, of playing a role, sometimes even badly or foolishly as a child would. When we see Mario Montez donning a shimmery black dress and doing the “Spanish dance,” which recalls the Dietrich of Dishonored (1931) and especially The Devil Is a Woman (1935), we become privy to an erotic celebration of a Hollywood of the mind, which Montez evokes through clothing and gesture.
The critic Ken Kelman also compared Flaming Creatures to ancient myth and epic poetry: “I will state flatly that I believe this flicture echoes with ancient ritual chants, with Milton and with Dante. It transpires in no setting, no place, no time… Myth is piled upon myth and none insisted upon. It is an inferno where these creatures flame; but their fierce joy makes it a paradise, too.” This notion that the action, the writhing movements, of the film seem to mysteriously unfold outside of a defined space is apt: Flaming Creatures, which was apparently shot on the rooftop of a now-shuttered New York repertory cinema, is the rare film which does not seem to possess environmental or spatial qualities. Rather, a vast network of other places and images are evoked, whether that be through the film’s passing interest in vampirism, or in the distant, murky vocals of Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952) heard on the soundtrack. A subterranean cinema (“myth piled upon myth”), half-remembered and half-real, lurks beneath this physical riot of bodies. And this is another way in which the film resembles Sternberg’s, whose films from Morocco (1930) to The Saga of Anatahan (1953) have nothing to do with a concrete, geographical reality, but only with their own visual worlds existing within the boundaries of the frame.
As a film with frankly pornographic elements that looks like it was shot on film stock made out of cigarette ash, Flaming Creatures will not be to all tastes, not even remotely. But I also think that, given its powerful affinities with drag culture, with camp traditions, and with the eternal glow of earlier forms of cinema, it deserves to be remembered for more than the controversy which has surrounded it for several decades. It remains a unique work in its absolute fury — not a fury of resentment or frustration, but of frenzied, wild passion and joyous intensity.
Flaming Creatures screens at IU Cinema on March 24 as part of the “Diva Worship” program with Trevor (1994) and Mala Mala (2014) for the Forever Queer series.
Jack Miller enjoys the films of Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur and John Ford. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in English, and currently resides in Chicago. He also enjoys listening to country and disco music.