#flaming creatures

“Jack Smith was a visionary performance artist and underground filmmaker who produced and directed a series of no-budget films during the 1950s and 1960s, the most famous being Flaming Creatures and Normal Love both from 1963. Smith peopled his camp b-movie melodramas with friends and often shot them on out-of-date film stock. As a filmmaker he seemed often careless about the fate of his movies, but their success and influence were far greater than the size of the audience that saw them. John Waters hailed Smith as “the only true underground filmmaker.” Susan Sontag described the controversial and allegedly pornographic Flaming Creatures as “a rare modern work of art; about joy and innocence.” While Andy Warhol said Smith was the only filmmaker he would steal from.”

/ From the article “Flaming Creatures: Icon of Perversion Jack Smith’s Fabulous Photographs” on the Dangerous Minds website, 2014 /

“Born in 1932, Smith came of age with other cultural rebels, but he wasn’t so much unwilling as genuinely unable to conform. What interested him was that state of mind one enters while creating, and that’s what he wanted to show on stage or screen. He didn’t care about finished products. He made the most important avant-garde film in America, then never completed any of his other films. He was known for actually re-editing during screenings. As for performances, no two were alike. He did not believe in acting, which was “hoodwinking,” or in memorizing lines, which rendered one “a mynah bird.””

/ From the article “Flaming Intrigue” by Cynthia Carr in the 2 March 2004 edition of The Village Voice /

Our most recent episode of Life Through a Queer Lens discusses the life and history-defining work of Kylar Broadus, an anti-discrimination lawyer, and transgender legal pioneer. Of course, like (almost) every episode, we end with an interesting fact, with this week being about the film Flaming Creatures, released the same year Kylar was born.

Jack Smith Would Be 90 Today

I owe more than I can say than I can say to the 1991 book Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, which goes far beyond its title to contextualize the films at its center, painting a continuum that connected underground cinema, off-off Broadway theatre, the Beats, performance art, visual art, and the climate in which the closeted lifestyles of the 1950s finally exploded into the…