(PDF) Flaming Creatures

Copyright 2020. WallFlower Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Account: s8849760.main.ehost AN: 2102683 ; Constantine Verevis.; Flaming Creatures EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/4/2023 9:01 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Background and Production 13 2 Reception and Controversy 27 3 The Film Work: Flaming Creatures 46 4 Aftermath and Legacy 99 Notes 115 Bibliography 117 Index 127 Copyright 2020. WallFlower Press. v EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AN: 2102683 ; Constantine Verevis.; Flaming Creatures Account: s8849760.main.ehost All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. INTRODUCTION At once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poi- gnant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanci- ful, 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 arti- fact, 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), Copyright 2020. WallFlower Press. and the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963). I had the privi- lege 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 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AN: 2102683 ; Constantine Verevis.; Flaming Creatures Account: s8849760.main.ehost INT RO DUCT IO N 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 Jour- nal” column in the Village Voice, and Susan Sontag’s influen- tial 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-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 Deli- cious 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 over- whelming 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 Produc- tion 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 under- ground of the 1960s through to the Hollywood dream factory of the 1930s and on into the contemporary, postanalogue 2 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 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 (cine- matic) 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 gro- tesques 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 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 ani- mations, 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 rav- ishingly beautiful . . . something that was fagotty, smart, and fun; something that left its mark on me—a mes- sage from Atlantis. (1997:170–73) On those occasions when I have arranged public screenings of Flaming Creatures—for instance, in the Audiovisions, B Is 3 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 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 transgres- sions. In their book Cult Cinema, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton identify Flaming Creatures as a key work in the devel- opment 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 Holly- wood 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 won- dered 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, for- bidden experience” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:160)—not only 4 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 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 cen- tral to the definition of all cult movies, especially “genuinely disturbing” works such as Flaming Creatures and Scorpio Ris- ing (Anger, 1963) (1991:123, 131, 2000:16–17). Film show- men 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 Dio- nysian revelry [that] pictures various transgressive sexual acts and reaches its climax with a transvestite orgy and simultane- ous 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 Mag- got Bingo (1983). When Smith began shooting Flaming Creatures in the sum- mer 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 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 1944) (see Jacobs 1997b:162–63). Edited with additional foot- age by Jacobs, the completed work is described in its hand- painted 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 imper- sonations 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 inter- rupted) visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack that juxta- poses snippets of movie music, news broadcasts, and con- fessions, 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 mov- ies 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 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 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 marvel- ous 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 imma- nent collapse: Blonde Cobra’s minimalism and meagerness, its aggres- sive imperfection, stand . . . as the recognition that the social permeation of commercial film [and its conserva- tive 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 integ- rity 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 sig- naled elsewhere (Verevis 2006:151–52; Perkins and Verevis 2014:4–5)—that Smith’s works, Blonde Cobra and, more par- ticularly, 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 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N and diva worship of Montez. In his seminal essay on Casa- blanca (Curtiz, 1941), Umberto Eco sees this type of intertex- tual 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 Crea- tures (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 rever- berate. 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 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N (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 duplic- itous 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 circulat- ing 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 perfor- mance 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 con- text and rearranged—increasingly became the background for Smith’s films and performances, and he envisioned a city uto- pia organized around a giant, central junkyard: “I think this 9 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N 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 him- self 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 rela- tionship 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 pro- ceeding 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 per- sonal 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 self- revelatory subject. That is, Jack Smith defended a rigorous subjectivity by leaving the document—Blonde Cobra, Flam- ing 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). 10 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use INT RO DUCT IO N This book proceeds by first outlining in chapter 1 the back- ground to Smith’s filmmaking and the “low-rent” circum- stances of the production of Flaming Creatures over the sum- mer 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 sub- cultural 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 inves- tigation 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 aes- thetic and life work in the period immediately following his death in 1989 and into the first decades of the new millen- nium. In combination, all four chapters explore the various ways in which Flaming Creatures’ tawdry exoticism, transgres- sive attitude, and coverage of gay subcultures contribute to its cult-film credentials and reputation. 11 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:02 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 1 BACKGROUND AND PRODUCTION People never know why they do what they do. But they have to have explanations for themselves and others. —Jack Smith, “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” (1963–1964) Mary Jordan’s documentary film Jack Smith and the Destruc- tion of Atlantis (2007) begins with a number of sound bites— arresting grabs from Smith interviews and performances— including a halting admission: “Me? I’m . . . I’m Ali Baba.” These words not only invoke Smith’s aesthetic muse—Maria Mon- tez, star of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Lubin, 1944)—but also present Smith as an artist enmeshed in displaying his own self through the personage of exotic others. Following James Clifford’s account of “ethnographic surrealism,” Smith’s life work can be described as an ongoing exercise in “self- portraiture” that reveals an interest in those “autobiographi- cal moments in which the articulation of self and society [can] Copyright 2020. WallFlower Press. be brought to . . . consciousness” (1981:560). That is, by way of an “excess of subjectivity,” Smith’s strategy was to pro- vide the guarantee of an “objectivity”—a kind of “documen- tary truth”—but one that was paradoxically “a personal 13 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AN: 2102683 ; Constantine Verevis.; Flaming Creatures Account: s8849760.main.ehost B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N ethnography” (Clifford 1988:167). Like Clifford’s favored exam- ple of surrealist writer Michel Leiris, Smith appeared to keep “field notes on himself,” and his life work became a search for a “satisfactory way of telling—of collecting and displaying— his own uncertain existence” (1988:167, 170). In his work, Smith adopts an “ethnographic attitude” that invests in the withering analysis of a cultural reality identified as artificial and corrupt—what Smith called “Lobster-land”—and sup- plants it with an “exotic alternative” that “delights in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms,” the fantasy of Smith’s muse-inspired “Montez-land” (Clifford 1981:549). Smith’s life work thus combines an “acute sense of the futility of exis- tence with a tenacious desire to salvage meaningful details,” separating poetic gestures and desperate antics from the banality of everyday life (Clifford 1988:173). Smith’s posing and recomposing of identity is rendered from the very beginning of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, where he says: “My past is dead. Remember, I came out of nowhere.” Born in Columbus, Ohio, on November 14, 1932, to a mother of Hungarian descent, Smith once referred to himself as “a Hungarian Hill-billy [sic]” (quoted in Eberstadt 1997:71). Insisting that he was a damaged child, he dramati- cally told his patron, Isabel Eberstadt, that “his father was cut in half by a shrimp boat when he [Jack] was a child” and described his mother as an “ogress”: “a trained nurse who specialized in isolating her dying patients and extracting large bequests from them” (Eberstadt 1997:71). Smith’s early col- laborator, sometime friend and filmmaker Ken Jacobs, makes a similar observation: “Jack would be reticent about giving the real facts of his life. I never knew when he spoke about his childhood: was it a self-amusing fabrication or was it fact?” (in Jordan 2007). Semitoext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer adds that Smith arrived in New York without a past, “a man from the desert wrapped up in veils” (in Jordan 2007), but it is now 14 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N widely known that Smith and his family left Columbus when he was seven, moving first to Galveston, Texas, and then on to Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1951, Smith enrolled in a local com- munity college but withdrew fairly quickly and moved to Chi- cago, where he worked as an usher at the Orpheum Theater. In 1953, he moved again, this time (via a brief stay in Los Angeles) to New York, taking up residence in a hotel on Twelfth Street near Union Square (Leffingwell 1997:71). In New York, Smith became interested in experimental the- ater and attended classes at the City College of New York in Morningside Heights, where he met the filmmakers (and soon collaborators) Ken Jacobs and Bob Fleischner. Smith and Jacobs were living within blocks of each other on the Lower East Side (on East Fifth and Sixth Streets) and “forged [a friendship] out of their mutual disgust with the culture around them and a deeply felt, morally chosen attraction to the marginal and the refused” (Pierson 2011:6). As an actor, Smith first emerged in Jacobs’s underground films, appear- ing initially in Little Stabs at Happiness (1959–1962) and the epic junk-film collage Star Spangled to Death ([1957–1959] 2003–2004) and then later in Jacobs and Fleischner’s remark- able film Blonde Cobra (1959–1963). Like the determinedly Beat collaborations of Ron Rice and actor Taylor Mead—The Flower Thief (Rice, 1960) and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (Rice, 1963)—Jacobs’s early works endeavored to present the cultural change, the freedom and spiritual awak- ening, that was emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Carney 1995:202; Hanhardt 1995:215; Joseph 2008:235–38). In his early films with Smith and performer Jerry Sims—“an extraordinary example of human wreckage” (Pierson 2011:6)— Jacobs embraced a typically Beat attitude to renounce the social responsibilities and emotional demands of adulthood and of so-called Normals. In its place, he developed a “new film idiom,” a demented aesthetic vision “devoted to spontaneous antics 15 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N and manic despair, in which socially marginal underdogs dra- matized themselves as the true antiheroes of America’s scrap-heap civilization” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:47). Along with Jacobs, Smith embraced a trash aesthetic and a “politics of failure” in distinct opposition to the prevailing and puritanical ideology of consumer culture and corporate suc- cess (Sitney 1979:334; Rowe 1982:39). Jacobs recalls: “We were obsessed by the quality of failure. My film, Star Span- gled to Death, is a testament to failure. Jack and I had a horror of life, a deep disgust with existence. Jack indulged in it spite- fully, he would plunge himself into the garbage of life. . . . We suffered from nostalgia already, saw Hollywood as a seedy garbage heap” (quoted in Rowe 1982:39). Smith’s activities during these early years in New York included the opening of the Hyperbole Photography Studio around 1957, a storefront space on Eighth Street near Cooper Figure 1.1: Jack Smith in Blonde Cobra (Fleischner and Jacobs, 1959–1963). 16 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N Square, where Smith transferred an aesthetic of impoverish- ment and fascination with tawdry images of Hollywood to his early “experimental color photography” (Helen Gee in Jordan 2007). Art curator Lawrence Rinder writes that “Smith found salvation from the banality of postwar American mainstream culture in the sheer artifice and ingenuity of . . . celluloid dreams,” creating color photographs that were “extraordinary puzzles of bodies [and] bedclothes” and surrealist collages of other seemingly unrelated items: “a frozen chicken, an old radio, a chart of the stars, drapes, veils, books, and photos clipped from newspapers” (1997:139–40). Exhibiting the same unerring sense of composition that characterized filmmaker Josef von Sternberg’s best collaborations with Marlene Diet- rich, Smith’s compositions resembled production shots from some “achingly absent” motion picture: “Jack would make these photographs [that] appeared as if they were stills from a movie. So there was no movie, but there were these very, very evocative images that suggested a movie” (Jacobs in Jordan 2007). As film historian P. Adams Sitney describes Smith’s early photographs, they (like his later film work) stripped away convention to reveal a “visual truth,” assem- bling all that was implicated in the films of von Sternberg (and the Hollywood dream factory)—“visual texture, androgynous sexual presence, exotic locations”—but without the banal encumbrances of narrative motivation and plot (1979:353; see also J. Smith 1963–1964a). From the fall of 1961 to June 1962, Smith staged a series of photographic sessions that produced a large number of small- format, black-and-white images, nineteen of which appeared in The Beautiful Book (J. Smith [1962] 2002), a small volume published in a limited edition by the poet Piero Heliczer’s Dead Language Press. In a promotional statement for the book, Ron Rice attested to the dense body language and mesmer- izing gesture of Smith’s compositions: “We studied these 17 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N photographs with keen eye discovering new & more beautiful images hidden in every dissolve & curve of the draperies & silks which ran through these masterpieces like some long lost mysterious fume from byzantium” (advertising statement printed on a slip of paper that accompanied The Beautiful Book and reproduced in Leffingwell et al. 1997:109). The Beautiful Book included poses by several “models”—Mario Montez, Francis Francine, Joel Markman, Arnold Rockwood, and Irving Rosenthal—who would often appear in Smith’s early photographs and films (including Flaming Creatures), but above all it showcased artist-model Marian Zazeela. Later in 1962, Zazeela would make a “cameo” appearance (in an elabo- rately populated tableau) at the end of Flaming Creatures, the lead role of which Smith had created especially to commem- orate the work they had done together in still photography: “It was a part that would have allowed the fulfillment of any impressionable, imaginative, ambitious young woman’s fan- tasy: to be a Star in a Great Work of Art, to be a Dietrich to [Jack’s] von Sternberg” (Zazeela 1997:72). Smith mentions other collaborations with Zazeela, including an unfinished (“lost”) film, Cemeteries, based on a poem by Pablo Neruda (J. Smith 1962:59). But the artist–muse relationship changed abruptly when in June 1962 Zazeela began an intense rela- tionship with musician and minimalist composer La Monte Young, Smith writing with equal measures of pain and acri- mony in his journal: “The heart is a small room. When one person enters someone else must leave. Small true the size of a cunt” (1962:153). Around the same time as his break with Zazeela, Smith was introduced to the wunderkind musician and later film- maker Tony Conrad, who had moved to New York after grad- uating in mathematics from Harvard. Smith and Conrad would become odd-couple friends in the fall of 1962, Conrad working closely with Smith on the soundtrack for Flaming 18 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N Creatures and appearing briefly in the film in a torn, backless dress with his backside exposed (Joseph 2008:233). An associate of Young’s, with whom he collaborated in the The- ater of Eternal Music and the Dream Syndicate (Pouncey 2001), Conrad was introduced to Smith via Zazeela and moved into the apartment on Ninth Street that she had vacated and sublet to Smith (Joseph 2008:231–32). Conrad initially regarded everything Smith was working on—including the series of seminude photographs of Zazeela for The Beautiful Book—as “some kind of contemptible New York art pornogra- phy.” And Conrad was likewise unimpressed when he found Smith working on a “gigantic grey painting of a vase of flow- ers” that was to be “the set for [his] new movie” (Conrad in Reisman 1990–1991:63). Days after making this observation, experiencing for the first time “the full flush of [Smith’s] inspi- ration and spirit,” Conrad offered to help carry the painting up to the roof of the old Windsor Theatre on Grand Street, where, outside of the back of a small sixth-floor apartment, Smith was preparing to shoot Flaming Creatures (in Reisman 1990– 1991:63–64). Up on the sun-washed roof, Conrad found that “there were lots of weird substances being consumed and strange people arriving on the scene”: “And boy, was I sur- prised when it turned out that people took three hours to put on their makeup [and] very more surprised when people took several more hours to put on their costumes . . . of mixed gender, of non-specific period and body coverage. . . . The whole experience was mysterious and electrifying” (in Reis- man 1990–1991:64). Smith’s associates typically described him as a highly engaged and demanding director who insisted that “you can’t get artistic results with ‘Normals’ ” (Mario Montez in Jordan 2007) and who set about transforming his models and actors from “ordinary mortals into gods and goddesses, into Superstars, into Flaming Creatures of the night” (Zazeela 19 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N 1997:119). Smith declared his ambition to realize a company, his own Hollywood dream factory, Cinemaroc Movie Studios, and invited his overstimulated creatures—including his most famous creation, Mario Montez (a.k.a. René Rivera)—to a new apartment he shared with Conrad at 56 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side for evening dress-up and recording ses- sions that he called “Tangier fantasies” (Conrad 2006:64–65). In performances such as “The First Memoirs of Maria Mon- tez” (February 1963; see J. Smith 1963–1964b), Smith staged for Conrad’s tape recorder his own version of “Montez-land” and communicated the impossibility of recovering the Holly- wood of the 1940s as anything but a series of refigured fragments—“catastrophic remakes”—filtered through his per- sona and cult predisposition of the time (see J. Smith 1997a, 1997b). In this way, the intersection of Smith’s collage work and love of cinema also owed much to the artist-filmmaker Joseph Cornell, whose early surrealist collage film Rose Hobart (1936) was assembled by reediting fragments of the Columbia Pictures jungle drama East of Borneo (Melford, 1931) to pay tribute to its star, Rose Hobart (Sitney 1979:347–48; Hober- man 1997a:158). Flaming Creatures was shot over approximately eight weekend afternoons from the late summer through to the early fall of 1962 and photographed by Smith on a borrowed 16mm Bolex camera using a variety of expired (said to be stolen) film stocks, including Perutz Tropical Film (Hoberman 1997a:159, 2001:27). The only known visual documentation of the shoot is three rolls of color and black-and-white film taken by the painter and photographer Norman Solomon, who accompanied his friend Ray Johnson to one of the sessions on the roof of the Windsor (see Hoberman 2001:53–75). The production photographs show the film set to be a small and secluded but open-air space, an estimated ten-by-fourteen feet marked out by a painter’s drop cloth and littered with a 20 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N pile of costumes and décor. Among those pictured are lead players Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, and Arnold Rockwood in various stages of dress and undress. A ladder, supported between a tall A-frame and the roof of the loft, provided a van- tage point for overhead shooting, and one photograph shows Smith—youthful, in short sleeves and flip-flops—atop the trestle with a three-lens Bolex in hand (Hoberman 1997a:160, 2001:27). Toward the end of the shoot, Zazeela agreed to pose for a single sequence and arrived at the Windsor accompanied by La Monte Young, Irving Rosenthal, and Angus MacLise, all of whom appear alongside her in a final tableau vivant. Recalling the shoot in her “On Location” piece twelve years later, Joan Adler wrote: “[Flaming Creatures] was shot on the borrowed roof of the old [Windsor] theatre in broiling sunlight with the set falling all over them, high as kites, Jack pouring ceiling plaster all over them . . . and careering dangerously above them on some swinging, home-made contraption” (1975:12). Although such an account suggests a riotous and improvised shoot, one nonparticipating observer, filmmaker Richard Preston, who occupied an apartment adjacent to the roof, reported that Smith “took great care in preparing for each shooting session” and that the production was “orderly” and “businesslike” (quoted in Hoberman 1997a:160). Such an assessment is supported by three pages of Smith’s journal- diary, which provide a detailed schedule for the shoot and sug- gest a creative play between the scripted and the unex- pected. The first of these pages—headed with what might be alternative titles for the film, “Flaking Moldy Almond Petals” and “The Snowstorm of Almond Petal Moldiness Flaking”— outlines the film’s opening segments (J. Smith 1962:55–57).1 The first of these segments—the “Smirching Sequence”— has “Marion & Francine apply lipstick” and calls for “close ups of toothless mouth w beard smirching make up on” and “Naked men smirching lips” (J. Smith 1962:55). The second 21 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N describes Marion (replaced in the film by the character Deli- cious Delores, played by Sheila Bick, wife of one of Zazeela’s high school boyfriends) and Francine’s first encounter and the events that lead to the central Orgy-Earthquake Sequence: “Marion & Francine pose about envying eachothers lips. . . . They drape about in front of back-drop & form stills . . . F.F. eyes become inflamed. F.F. grabs at M. The chase[.] Marion strikes out with purse. the clinch. F.F. pulls out her tit. (E.Q builds up.) . . . C.U. of F.F. bouncing M’s tit. Marion screaming & struggling. Final shot of many people holding M down as F. bobbles her tit. F’s erection under his dress” (1962:55). The following page of the journal, headed “Moldy Rapture,” pro- vides instructions for the Earthquake Sequence—complete with swaying chandelier, falling petals, and clanging bells— and details Marion’s recovery in the arms of the Fascinating Woman, Mary (played by Judith Malina, cofounder of the Liv- ing Theater): “Marion stands stunned. She puts her hand to her head and starts to swoon (her boob is still out.) Mary rushes in & catches her & carrys her off in her arms. . . . C.S. Marion reclining Mary bending over her. Their eyes streaked with tears, they smile and gaze at eachothers eyes! Blossoms descend. (Violin music)” (1962:57). At the bottom of the page is a description of a proposed final sequence: “Mary puts Marion on a camel and they ride off across the desert—Mary’s bur- noose flowing (chorus of religious music swells)” (1962:57). Unrealized (and within the constraints of the production prac- tically unfilmable), the latter sequence was replaced by an episode added at some later stage and outlined in a different ink on the facing page of the journal: “A coffin on the set— Veronica Lake comes out—petals on lid disappear. She sucks Frankie Dry & they get up & two step together which turns into a production number” (1962:56). That the production was carefully planned is further sup- ported by the mere fifteen minutes of surviving outtakes, 22 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N which provide evidence of a tight shooting ratio (Hoberman 2001:32). Conrad salvaged the scraps from the cutting-room floor and decades later used them to create five short, 16mm loops titled Re-framing Creatures ([1963] 2009) (Perlson 2009). It is rumored that once filming was complete, Flaming Crea- tures took just one week to edit, but Hoberman contests this claim, saying that the dense montage—for example, of the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence and the final, extended (“Carnival of Ecstasy”) dance sequence—suggests otherwise and that, regardless, several months were required to complete the synchronized sound accompaniment that Smith and Conrad assembled on quarter-inch magnetic tape over the winter of 1962–1963 (1997a:161). Conrad—who had provided sound for Smith’s first completed film, the single-reel Scotch Tape (1959–1962)—said that Smith had a very clear idea of what he wanted for Flaming Creatures: “I remember him saying, ‘Okay, the sound track’s gotta start with this music from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ ” (2006:62). The instruction was dutifully followed, with Conrad likely drawing upon Mario Montez’s collection of reel-to-reel audio recordings of films that had played on television (Siegel 2014a:368). Only one of Conrad’s personal musical suggestions—the use of Bartok’s Solo Violin Sonata (1944)—carried over into the final soundtrack (Conrad 2006:63), but Conrad also helped realize Smith’s audi- tory requirements. These requirements included the “Carni- val of Ecstasy” mix, “made by taking wires from a whole bunch of phonographs and just twisting them together and running that into the tape recorder,” and the dense horror show of screams for the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, produced using a loop-feedback technique that Conrad had developed in 1961 for Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders (Conrad 2006:62). Across the winter of 1962–1963, Smith screened an unfin- ished version of Flaming Creatures for friends and associates, 23 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N with Conrad present and in charge of the sound, which was running off quarter-inch reel-to-reel tapes (a setup that was in place until a second version replaced the first and was wed- ded to the film). Conrad remembered his first encounter with Flaming Creatures as a “lambent, wonderful, surging, frolick- ing, exquisitely, happy experience” (in Jordan 2007). Sylvère Lotringer describes the film as a “flaming parody of what life could be if things were not stifled. It was a [subversive] parody of Hollywood, and Hollywood was America” (in Jordan 2007). And the filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas, who was among the first to write publicly about the film, heralded with great enthu- siasm its arrival in his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice on April 18, 1964: Jack Smith just finished a great movie, Flaming Crea- tures, which is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European mov- ies. I saw it privately and there is little hope that Smith’s movie will ever reach the movie theatre screens. . . . Flaming Creatures will not be shown theatrically because our social-moral-etc. guides are sick. . . . This movie will be called pornographic, degenerate, homosexual, trite, disgusting, etc. It is all that, and it is so much more than that. (1964b:13) Around the same time, from 1962 to 1964, Mekas, in his capacity as editor, published a number of Smith’s essays in Film Culture magazine, including Smith’s most sustained aes- thetic statement, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” and a contemporaneous piece of writing on von Sternberg, “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” (see J. Smith 1962–1963, 1963–1964a). The first of these publications was a paean to the Hollywood diva Maria Montez—“Moldy Movie Queen, Shoulder pad, gold platform wedgie Siren” (J. Smith 24 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GR O UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N 1962–1963:28)—but here Smith also laid out an entire mani- festo of his art, advancing the idea that the intuitive appeal of Montez’s “spectacular, flaming image” was (as his own film Flaming Creatures would soon be) “the bane of [those] critics . . . hostile and uneasy in the presence of a visual phe- nomenon” (1962–1963:29; see also Tavel 1997 and Tartaglia 2001). For Smith, Maria Montez’s film extravaganzas—along with other so-called secret-flix (that is, cult movies and their performers)—were moldy artifacts from the declining Holly- wood studio system, “imperfect and ugly” but imbued with revolutionary potential (Smith in Malanga 1967:16; Hoberman 1997b). Smith’s manifesto begins: At least in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Schehe- razade, etc. She believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe. Those who could believe, did. Those who saw the World’s Worst Actress just couldn’t and they missed the magic. Too bad—their loss. . . . The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into sets. They achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and a truth. . . . To admit of Maria Montez validities would be to turn on to moldiness, Glamourous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naivete [sic], and glittering technicol- ored trash! “Geef me that Coparah chewel!” “Geef me that Coparah chewel!” —line of dialogue from Cobra Woman, possibly the greatest line of dialogue in any American flic. (1962–1963:28, emphasis in original) 25 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use B AC K GRO UND A ND PRO DUCT IO N In “The Perfect Queer Appositeness of Jack Smith,” Jerry Tartaglia—the filmmaker who, quite remarkably, came across the original camera negative for Flaming Creatures in a pile of discarded sound fill and later undertook the restoration of Smith’s film works (see Tartaglia 1997)—writes that although Smith’s seminal Film Culture article is ostensibly about Mon- tez, it is preeminently the work in which Smith lays out “the manifesto of his art, the expression of his vision, and the tes- tament of his Queer soul” (2001:39). Smith wrote, “Having Maria Montez as a favourite star has not been gratuitous . . . since it has left a residue of notions, interesting to me as a film-maker and general film aesthete” (1962–1963:30). Toward the end of the essay, in response to his own question, “What is it we want from film?” Smith put forward this answer: A vital experience an imagination an emotional release all these & what we want from life Contact with something we are not, know not, think not, feel not, understand not, therefore: An expansion. (1962–1963:32, emphasis in original) Smith took these “notions”—an impulse to demystify and valorize the positive emotion of transgression—into his cultist vision not only for Flaming Creatures but also for his life work. 26 EBSCOhost - printed on 12/4/2023 9:03 PM via MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use