Flaming Creatures on 16mm

Spectrum Between presents Jack Smith’s notorious 1963 film Flaming Creatures on 16mm. Now recognized as an aesthetic and historical landmark in the traditions of American avant-garde film and radical queer art practice, Smith’s film was greeted largely with revulsion by critics and intellectuals when it first screened in New York City. It was championed by a small but influential crowd of underground artists, and quickly became a major censorship battleground. Attempted screenings lead to police raids, free speech protests, and eventually the arrests and convictions of Jonas Mekas, Ken and Flo Jacobs, and Jerry Tartaglia on obscenity grounds. 

A significant influence on Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes On Camp,” she wrote: “The only thing to be regretted about the close-ups of limp penises and bouncing breasts, the shots of masturbation and oral sexuality, in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures is that it makes it hard simply to talk about this remarkable and beautiful film, one has to defend it.” Indeed, its position as a political and legal symbol threaten to obscure the pleasure and comedy in Smith’s vision. Featuring a cast of Warhol Superstars and other New York underground luminaries, as well as a score by Tony Conrad, Flaming Creatures is a whirlwind celebration of perverse sexuality, gender ambiguity, and orgiastic violence, animated by Smith’s playful, amateur approach and his love for trashy Hollywood B-movies and exotica. Though digital copies of Flaming Creaturescan be found online, these poor transfers lose much of the film’s dreamlike visual texture, which is much better appreciated on a proper 16mm print.

Flaming Creatures will be followed by a 16mm print of Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1963), an experimental short film shot during the production of Jack Smith’s unfinished Normal Love, which was meant to be the follow-up to Flaming Creatures. Both a behind-the-scenes document of Smith and his cast, and a beguiling work of art in its own right, Rice makes use of Smith’s tools to notably different ends.

Spectrum Between is an independent, nomadic film exhibition group based in Portland. We are dedicated to screening all manner of experimental, avant-garde, and underground films in their original analog formats.