Flaming Creatures 9780231851305

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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.

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Jeffrey Weinstock

DONNIE DARKO Geoff King

THIS IS SPINAL TAP Ethan de Seife

BAD TASTE Jim Barratt

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY Glyn Davis

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA Ian Cooper

BLADE RUNNER Matt Hills

THE EVIL DEAD Kate Egan

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Dean DeFino

QUADROPHENIA Stephen Glynn

FRANKENSTEIN Robert Horton

THEY LIVE D. Harlan Wilson

DEEP RED Alexia Kannas

MS. 45 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

STRANGER THAN PARADISE Jamie Sexton

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN Alessandra Santos

SERENITY Frederick Blichert

DANGER: DIABOLIK Leon Hunt

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE David Maguire

THE SHINING Kevin J. Donnelly

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 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) | ISBN 9780231851305 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Flaming creatures (Motion picture) | Experimental films—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1997.F54 V47 2019 (print) | LCC PN1997.F54 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025481 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025482

Series design by Elsa Mathern Cover image: Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures, 1962–63, film still from 16mm black and white release print. © Jack Smith Archive. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

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

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Long in formation—with enough false starts and delays to have made even Jack Smith sit up and take notice—the 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 colleagues— Adrian Danks, Claire Perkins, Dana Polan, Iain Smith, and Deane Williams—for looking over full drafts and providing valuable suggestions, many of which have found their way into the final document. Thanks, similarly, to Columbia vii

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University Press’s two anonymous readers for helpful comments that contributed to the shape and detail of the work. Finally, this book—which is for “creatures” everywhere—is dedicated to Zoi and Mia. May you rage and flame.

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INTRODUCTION

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 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), and the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963). I had the privilege 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

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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 Journal” column in the Village Voice, and Susan Sontag’s 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 sequence—dramatically underscored by a three-and-a-halfminute 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 film’s 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” (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 Production 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 underground of the 1960s through to the Hollywood dream factory of the 1930s and on into the contemporary, postanalogue

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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 (cinematic) 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 grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world” (1997:71). American playwright and avantgarde 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 animations, 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 ravishingly beautiful . . . something that was fagotty, smart, and fun; something that left its mark on me—a message from Atlantis. (1997:170–73) On those occasions when I have arranged public screenings of Flaming Creatures—for instance, in the Audiovisions, B Is

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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 transgressions. In their book Cult Cinema, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton identify Flaming Creatures as a key work in the development 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 Hollywood 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 wondered 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, forbidden experience” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:160)—not only 4

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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 central to the definition of all cult movies, especially “genuinely disturbing” works such as Flaming Creatures and Scorpio Rising (Anger, 1963) (1991:123, 131, 2000:16–17). Film showmen 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 Dionysian revelry [that] pictures various transgressive sexual acts and reaches its climax with a transvestite orgy and simultaneous 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 Maggot Bingo (1983). When Smith began shooting Flaming Creatures in the summer 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

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1944) (see Jacobs 1997b:162–63). Edited with additional footage by Jacobs, the completed work is described in its handpainted 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 impersonations 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 interrupted) visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack that juxtaposes snippets of movie music, news broadcasts, and confessions, 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 movies 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

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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 marvelous 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 immanent collapse: Blonde Cobra’s minimalism and meagerness, its aggressive imperfection, stand . . . as the recognition that the social permeation of commercial film [and its conservative 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 integrity 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 signaled elsewhere (Verevis 2006:151–52; Perkins and Verevis 2014:4–5)—that Smith’s works, Blonde Cobra and, more particularly, 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

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and diva worship of Montez. In his seminal essay on Casablanca (Curtiz, 1941), Umberto Eco sees this type of intertextual 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 Creatures (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 reverberate. 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

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(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 duplicitous 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 circulating 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 performance 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 context and rearranged—increasingly became the background for Smith’s films and performances, and he envisioned a city utopia organized around a giant, central junkyard: “I think this 9

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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 himself 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 relationship 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 proceeding 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 personal 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 selfrevelatory subject. That is, Jack Smith defended a rigorous subjectivity by leaving the document—Blonde Cobra, Flaming 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

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This book proceeds by first outlining in chapter 1 the background to Smith’s filmmaking and the “low-rent” circumstances of the production of Flaming Creatures over the summer 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 subcultural 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 investigation 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 aesthetic and life work in the period immediately following his death in 1989 and into the first decades of the new millennium. In combination, all four chapters explore the various ways in which Flaming Creatures’ tawdry exoticism, transgressive attitude, and coverage of gay subcultures contribute to its cult-film credentials and reputation.

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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 Destruction 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 Montez, 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 “selfportraiture” that reveals an interest in those “autobiographical moments in which the articulation of self and society [can] be brought to . . . consciousness” (1981:560). That is, by way of an “excess of subjectivity,” Smith’s strategy was to provide the guarantee of an “objectivity”—a kind of “documentary truth”—but one that was paradoxically “a personal 13

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ethnography” (Clifford 1988:167). Like Clifford’s favored example 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 supplants 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 existence 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 dramatically 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 collaborator, 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

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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 community college but withdrew fairly quickly and moved to Chicago, 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 theater 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, appearing 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 remarkable 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 awakening, 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

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and manic despair, in which socially marginal underdogs dramatized 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 success (Sitney 1979:334; Rowe 1982:39). Jacobs recalls: “We were obsessed by the quality of failure. My film, Star Spangled to Death, is a testament to failure. Jack and I had a horror of life, a deep disgust with existence. Jack indulged in it spitefully, 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

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Square, where Smith transferred an aesthetic of impoverishment 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 Dietrich, 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,” assembling 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 smallformat, 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 mesmerizing gesture of Smith’s compositions: “We studied these 17

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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 elaborately populated tableau) at the end of Flaming Creatures, the lead role of which Smith had created especially to commemorate 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 fantasy: 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 relationship with musician and minimalist composer La Monte Young, Smith writing with equal measures of pain and acrimony 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 filmmaker Tony Conrad, who had moved to New York after graduating 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

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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 Theater 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 pornography.” And Conrad was likewise unimpressed when he found Smith working on a “gigantic grey painting of a vase of flowers” 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] inspiration 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 surprised 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 Reisman 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

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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 sessions that he called “Tangier fantasies” (Conrad 2006:64–65). In performances such as “The First Memoirs of Maria Montez” (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 Hollywood of the 1940s as anything but a series of refigured fragments—“catastrophic remakes”—filtered through his persona 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; Hoberman 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

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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 vantage 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 journaldiary, which provide a detailed schedule for the shoot and suggest a creative play between the scripted and the unexpected. 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

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describes Marion (replaced in the film by the character Delicious 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,” provides 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 Living 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 burnoose flowing (chorus of religious music swells)” (1962:57). Unrealized (and within the constraints of the production practically 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 supported by the mere fifteen minutes of surviving outtakes, 22

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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 Creatures 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 auditory requirements. These requirements included the “Carnival 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 unfinished version of Flaming Creatures for friends and associates, 23

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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 wedded to the film). Conrad remembered his first encounter with Flaming Creatures as a “lambent, wonderful, surging, frolicking, 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 enthusiasm its arrival in his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice on April 18, 1964: Jack Smith just finished a great movie, Flaming Creatures, which is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies. 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 aesthetic 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

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1962–1963:28)—but here Smith also laid out an entire manifesto 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 phenomenon” (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 Hollywood 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, Scheherazade, 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 technicolored 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

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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 Montez, it is preeminently the work in which Smith lays out “the manifesto of his art, the expression of his vision, and the testament 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.

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Ideas get moldy but art goes on. —Jack Smith, journal (1962:inside front cover) At the time of the first theatrical screenings of Flaming Creatures in 1963, Jonas Mekas was at the height of his influence in the New York experimental film community. In 1955, Mekas had published the first issue of Film Culture magazine, and since the late 1950s he had been writing his regular “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice, which spoke for a new generation of filmmakers working outside the established motion-picture industry. In the nineteenth issue of Film Culture (1959), Mekas introduced the Independent Film Award to mark “the entrance of a new generation of film makers in America,” and in September 1960 he was one of twenty-three independent filmmakers who assembled to establish the New American Cinema Group, a body that did not subscribe to any particular aesthetic practice but was united in its commitment to innovation and individual expression. The group’s founding manifesto sought to redefine independent filmmaking by rethinking all areas of production and announced its plan to establish its own cooperative distribution center 27

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(Mekas 1961:131, 1962; Hanhardt 1995:216, 223). Distribution was one of the main problems facing independent filmmakers in New York, and up to this point it had been managed mostly by Cinema 16, the film society formed in 1947 by Amos and Marcia Vogel to handle a wide range of political, foreign, and avant-garde material. When in 1961 Vogel elected not to distribute Stan Brakhage’s film Anticipation of the Night (1958), Mekas and a number of colleagues decided to form the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, officially establishing it in early 1962 (Tomkins 1973:37). The cooperative’s basic policy—that no film would be rejected for any reason—was inclusiveness, an idea that connected to the broader social counterculture and campaigns for civil rights. The co-op began to distribute independent films to art cinemas, film societies, universities, and other outlets and started regular screenings at the Charles Theatre—“a moldering seven-hundred-seat movie house” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:41)—at East Twelfth Street and Avenue B, around the corner from Mekas’s apartment on East Thirteenth Street (Tomkins 1973:38). In July 1962, the Charles began a series of midnight screenings organized by Mekas that culminated in a single grand Filmmakers Festival that included Ron Rice’s seminal Beat film The Flower Thief (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:42–44). When the Charles closed in September 1962 ahead of reopening as a more conventional venue, the midnight screenings were moved to the nearby Bleecker Street Cinema, where in February 1963 Mekas organized another program of films, this time featuring Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death ([1957–1959] 2003– 2004) and Little Stabs at Happiness (1959–1962), both of which featured Smith. Two months later, on April 29, 1963, Flaming Creatures had its theatrical premiere on a double bill with Blonde Cobra at the Bleecker Street Cinema (Hoberman 1997a:161). 28

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Characterized by their display of nondominant sexualities, their (at least implicit) political activism, and their extreme poverty of means, films such as Little Stabs at Happiness, Blonde Cobra, and Flaming Creatures marked out a vital shift in the New American Cinema that contrasted sharply with the subjective vision—the exploration of mood and sensation— associated with lyrical works such as Stan Brakhage’s epic Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Essayist Susan Sontag described the new movement: “The hallmark of one of the two new avantgarde styles in American cinema (Jack Smith, Ron Rice et al., but not Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage) is its wilful [sic] technical crudity. The newer [underground] films—both the good ones and the poor, uninspired work—show a maddening indifference to every element of technique, a studied primitiveness. This is a very contemporary style, and very American” (1964a:374). Not nearly so restrained, Mekas, writing in program notes for a Film-makers’ Showcase at the Bleecker Street Cinema on February 11, 1963, effused over the “poetry of the absurd” typified by films such as Blonde Cobra, Little Stabs at Happiness, and (probably in its first public screening) Smith’s Scotch Tape, the short color film that shows Jacobs, Sims, and one of Smith’s sometimes models, Reese Haire, prancing around a vacant lot strewn with rubble. Mekas observed: These are a few examples of the new film poetry being created by the New York film underground today. A free, unforced, spontaneous, liberating, newborn poetry. No intellectual & formalistic & symbolist imagery, no forced act: they are light & careless & beautiful. They are made with utmost creative freedom, with no art, content, professionalism etc complexes. They have the freedom of the image of Brakhage, the “uncleanliness” of action painting, the freedom of Theatre of Chance and the 29

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Theatre of Happenings, and the sense of humor of Zen. Their imagination, coming from deeply “deranged” or, more truly, rearranged & liberated senses, is boundless. Nothing is forced in these films. They rediscover the poetry and wisdom of the irrational, of nonsense, of the insignificant, of the absurd—they attack and destroy in us the false, the pretentious, the contrived, the phony. They open us for the poetry that comes from regions which are beyond the reach of intellect & reason. It is art in its most engaged & innocent & useless sense: it disengages us from false engagements. (1963a:70; see also Mekas 1962:13) As described by Mekas, a defining characteristic of the new underground was its careful attention to performance as well as its investment in and borrowings from the innovations of contemporaneous radical improvisational theater groups, most notably the Living Theater (cofounded by Judith Malina in 1947) and Ronald Tavel’s (soon to be established) Theater of the Ridiculous (Rowe 1982:5). The underground nurtured its emerging pantheon of stars, and the Village Voice even published a playful list of its “top ten” (actually eleven) luminaries: “Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant, Empire State Building, Winifred Bryan, Jack Smith, Jerry Sims, Donna Kerness, Morio [sic] Montez, Jane Holzer, Joel Markman, Naomi Levine” (Mekas 1972:169). Writing in his “Movie Journal” column for May 2, 1963, Mekas—who, having studied the Stanislavski method, had a particular interest in the possibilities of acting and performance—formalized his screening notes to describe the new group of films, extended now to include Flaming Creatures, as “Baudelairean” in its sensibility: Lately, several movies have appeared from the underground which, I think, are marking a very important turn 30

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in independent cinema. . . . The movies I have in mind are Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man; Jack Smith’s The Flaming Creatures [sic]; Ken Jacobs’ Little Stabs at Happiness; Bob Fleischner’s [sic] Blonde Cobra—four works that make up the real revolution in cinema today. These works are illuminating and opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts; a content which Baudelaire . . . gave to world literature a century ago. (1972:85) Mekas identified Blonde Cobra as the “masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema . . . a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy” (1972:86). For Mekas, this cycle of films, in contrast to the cine-poems of Brakhage and others, amounted to a new type of poetry, “at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty” (1972:85). Describing the films’ sexual politics, he wrote: “These are, as Ken Jacobs put it, ‘dirty-mouthed’ films. They all contain homosexual and lesbian elements. The homosexuality[,] because of its existence outside the official moral conventions, has unleashed sensitivities and experiences which have been at the bottom of all great poetry since the beginning of humanity’ (1972:86). The following month, on June 13, 1963, Mekas further described the “renaissance” under way in the New York underground, in this instance singling out Flaming Creatures as “certainly one of the most beautiful and original films made recently anywhere” (1972:87). Protesting the fact that the Bleecker Street Cinema had canceled its screenings— “they [the theater’s management] thought the independent cinema was ruining the ‘reputation of the theatre.’ Dig That!”— Mekas insisted that the underground would not stay hidden but would “keep coming up, to bother . . . [and] to show . . . 31

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shameful and glorious things” (1972:87). In September, this attitude led Mekas to spend a day at the Flaherty Film Seminar in Brattleboro, Vermont. Although the seminar was devoted to a retrospective of the cinéma vérité of filmmakers such as Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers, Mekas took along with him prints of Flaming Creatures and Blonde Cobra, “two pieces of impure, naughty, and ‘uncinematic’ cinema,” for a late-night showing: “Midnight screening in [sleepy] Vermont! My God, we felt like underground even at Flaherty’s” (1972:95). Reporting on the event in “Movie Journal” on September 12, 1963, Mekas quoted Smith, who attested (Beat-like) to the “documentary” element that characterized his life work: “Movies aren’t just something like I came to; they are my life. After Flaming Creatures I realized that that wasn’t something I had [just] photographed: Everything really happened. . . . We really lived through it; you know what I mean? And it was really real. It just was” (quoted in Mekas 1972:95). On December 7, 1963, Mekas rented the Tivoli Theatre on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street for a Saturday midnight screening of Flaming Creatures. Supported by “rushes from Jack Smith’s Normal Love,” the session was advertised by the now well-known poster, hand drawn by Smith, depicting a spidery creature (see Mekas 1972:112). The theater was to double as a venue for presenting Smith with Film Culture’s annual Independent Film Award for Flaming Creatures. Past winning films were Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959), Pull My Daisy (Frank and Leslie, 1960), Primary (Leacock and Maysles, 1961), and The Dead and Prelude (Brakhage, 1962), and in the following year the sixth award would go to Warhol for the combined effort of Sleep (1963); Haircut, Eat, and Kiss (all 1963–1964); and Empire (1964). In bestowing the fifth award for “an original American contribution to cinema” to Smith for Flaming Creatures, Mekas wrote: 32

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In Flaming Creatures [Jack] Smith has graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous film-makers. He has shown more clearly than anyone before how the poet’s license includes all things, not only of spirit, but also of flesh; not only of dreams and of symbol, but also of solid reality. In no other art but the movies could this have so fully been done; and their capacity was realized by Smith. (1963b:1) However, just as the midnight screening was about to begin, the theater management acquiesced to pressure from the New York City’s Bureau of Licenses and canceled the screening. Outraged, Mekas used the roofs of parked cars outside the theater along Eighth Avenue to present the award. Supporters of the New American Cinema, led by young filmmaker Barbara Rubin, subsequently stormed and occupied the Tivoli until the police evacuated them (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:59). The incident was reported a week later in “A Statement on Flaming Creatures” published in the bottom left-hand corner of a page in the Village Voice (December 12, 1963). Signing this statement “FILM CULTURE magazine,” Mekas used it as an opportunity to advance the cause of underground film and to issue a call to arms to inveigh against state censorship: Last Saturday midnight the presentation of the Independent Film Award to Jack Smith and the screening of his film Flaming Creatures should have taken place at Tivoli Theatre. Enemies of the free cinema made anonymous 33

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and threatening calls to the censors and to the theatre. On last minute notice the screening was forbidden. As an act of protest, the Independent Film Association presentation took place on the tops of the cars in the busy New York street. A beautiful thing happened. People refused to leave. A few hundred took the theatre by force. The police were called. . . . People were threatened. . . . The time has come to disobey openly the censors of free expression in cinema. This time we’ll take a moral stand for art. . . . We’ll find places to show our work. We’ll screen our movies in public places, on the highway billboards and in the streets, if necessary. (Village Voice 1963:22) Callie Angell, former curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, writes that a press conference held by the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque at the Overseas Press Club in December was “organized to address the censorship of Flaming Creatures—perhaps also to exploit it for publicity purposes—and to promote the European tour of the new American cinema that Mekas and the Cinematheque had organized” (2014:164). Referring to archival photographs of the assembly (four of which appeared in volume 33 of Film Culture in 1964), Angell writes: “Smith was seated alone at the center table between two press people, looking rather defeated. . . . Seated to the right were Gregory Markopoulos, P. Adams Sitney, Andy Warhol, Ron Rice, and Jonas Mekas. . . . Seated to the left were Beverly Grant, Jerry Joffen, and Stan Vanderbeek. . . . And Barbara Rubin is in the audience, in dark glasses” (2014:164). Of particular interest to Angell is that Warhol—who had shot the fourminute silent color reel titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love” over the summer—appears among the group of filmmakers, “perhaps there to lend his presence 34

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in support of Flaming Creatures” (2014:164). Consistent with Smith’s later claims that Mekas had exploited the scandal around Flaming Creatures is Angell’s description of the filmmaker: “Jack Smith is singled out and kind of isolated— put on display as a kind of poster child for the promotion of freedom of speech in the arts—and not looking very happy about it either” (2014:164). Also that month (December 1963), Mekas was invited to judge at the Third International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-Le Zoute, Belgium. Accompanied by Rubin, who worked at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and, inspired by Smith’s work, had shot the most sexually explicit film of the underground, Christmas on Earth (1963), and by young Paul Adams Sitney, Mekas took along for exhibition a selection of recent underground films, including Scorpio Rising (Anger, 1963), Twice a Man (Markopoulos, 1963), Chumlum (Rice, 1964), Dog Star Man (Brakhage, 1961–1964), Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage, 1959), and Flaming Creatures (see Broughton 1964 and Tomkins 1973:39). When the other judges deemed Flaming Creatures unfit for public screening, Mekas protested by resigning from the jury and retreated to his hotel room, where he previewed the film to Agnès Varda, Roman Polanski, Jean-Luc Godard, and others (Tomkins 1973:39; also see Mekas 1972:111–15; Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:59; Hoberman 1997a:161). On the final night of screenings, Mekas and Rubin stormed the projection booth of the festival’s Crystal Room and projected Flaming Creatures until the lights and power were cut (Hoberman 1997a:162). Once again describing the protest as a stand against censorship, Mekas wrote in “Movie Journal” for January 16, 1964, “Our actions (by ‘our,’ I mean Barbara Rubin, Paul Adams Sitney, and myself) at Knokke-Le Zoute were motivated by our feelings against the suppression of any film or any aesthetic expression. . . . We made it clear 35

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that we were not fighting for this particular film [Flaming Creatures], but for the principle of free expression” (1972:112). In the end, though, Flaming Creatures was screened for the jury and awarded a special film maudit prize, a bemused Mekas writing: “[The jurors] thought that Flaming Creatures was a documentary! . . . Americans must really live like that, they thought. A wild image of America we left in Knokke-Le Zoute, I tell you. No wonder a State Department man was sitting next to our table wherever we went. I wonder what perverted thoughts were in his head” (1972:115). The events of Knokke-Le Zoute marked only the beginning of the controversy that would spill out over the coming year. When Mekas returned to New York at the start of 1964, he encountered a “contagion of censorship,” in part due to the city’s being cleaned up in anticipation of the New York World’s Fair (Tomkins 1973:39). Flaming Creatures screened without incident for three successive Mondays at the Gramercy Arts Theater on East Twenty-Third Street early in 1964, but on February 15 the police issued a summons to the theater owner, who immediately terminated the screenings (Tomkins 1973:39). Mekas’s response was to move the Filmmakers Festival to the New Bowery Theater on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. But on March 3, 1964, a raid of that venue interrupted a screening of Flaming Creatures, which was impounded along with some material from Normal Love and the only copy of the now lost “newsreel” Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love.” Articles in the New York Times on March 4 and the Village Voice on March 12 reported that Mekas, projectionist Ken Jacobs, ticket seller Florence Karpf (a.k.a. Flo Jacobs), and Gerald Sims had been arrested and charged with “showing an obscene motion picture” (Harrington 1964; New York Times 1964; see also Mekas 1964a; Tomkins 1973:39; Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:60).

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Writing for the Village Voice, Stephanie Gervis Harrington explained: Flaming Creatures, made by Jack Smith, is one of the better-known productions of America’s new film avantgarde. Flaming Creatures was described by Leslie Trumball of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which distributes it, as a “fantastic lampoon of commercialized sex and sexual mores.” . . . And according to Dr. Joseph Kaster, an instructor in myth and ritual . . . at the New York School of Social Research, Flaming Creatures is an “excellent” film. Dr. Kaster told the Voice that he found the film “full of symbolic motifs.” . . . There is nudity in it, he noted, but “it is there for a point, not for its own sake.” The film, he said, is “not in the least objectionable.” The District Attorney’s office, however, did not see it that way . . . because . . . the film and four of those involved in its showing were arrested by the police. (1964:3) Released without bail, Mekas risked (and landed) a second arrest the following week (March 13) by electing to screen Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour (1950) at the Writer’s Stage on East Fourth Street (Village Voice 1964b). Launching the Film-Makers’ Cooperative Anti-Censorship Fund (April 8) and explaining his actions in a Film Culture editorial (dated March 7)—later revised for publication in the Village Voice as “Underground Manifesto on Censorship” (March 12, 1964)—Mekas wrote: “Like Flaming Creatures, the Genet film, Un Chant d’amour, is a work or art [sic] and like any work of art it is above obscenity or pornography. . . . The new American

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film-maker does not believe in legal restrictions placed upon works of art. . . . We refuse to hide our work in restricted film societies. . . . Our art is for all the people. It must be open and available” (1964a:1; see also Mekas 1972:127–28). Mekas immediately found support in Sontag’s short editorial “Flaming Censorship” published in The Nation on March 30. Making reference to “the widely discussed Flaming Creatures, by a young film maker named Jack Smith,” Sontag wrote that although “the question of censorship of books and the arts has long been a vexing one . . . the only sound position must be a rejection of censorship per se” (1964b:311). This, she added, was for some, no doubt, an “uncomfortable position to maintain, for it requires defending the freedom for that which may be distasteful to some . . . perhaps even the majority” (1964b:311). Mekas responded in “Underground Manifesto on Censorship,” writing that the new American filmmaker “does not believe . . . in licensing or any form of censorship” and that “to consider Flaming Creatures obscene by a few extracted images, taken out of context, and to make a criminal case thereof, without making an attempt to understand the work as a whole[,] . . . is [sic] indeed a narrow, naive, and unintelligent way of looking at things” (1972:127–28; see also Mekas’s “Report from Jail” in Mekas 1972:129–30). The following month (April 13, 1964), Sontag’s review article “A Feast for Open Eyes” declared that the controversy around Flaming Creatures had made it “hard simply to talk about [Smith’s] remarkable and beautiful film; one [had] to defend it” (1964a:374). Contextualized by an editorial note on the then recent confiscation of the film by New York City police and the scheduled trials on it, Sontag argued that those who (mis)recognized Flaming Creatures’ depiction of nakedness and sexual embrace as pornographic failed to see that the film was a “brilliant spoof of sex” and a work “full of lyricism” 38

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(375). More significantly, in what would later be characterized as her “high-art” defense, she described Flaming Creatures as “a small but very important work in [the] tradition of the avant-garde cinema,” which included such films as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (1932), Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) (374). Although admitting to Flaming Creatures’ studied primitiveness and visual generosity, Sontag bracketed the film’s sexual politics to observe (in anticipation of her article “Notes on Camp”) that it “was made up of a rich collage of ‘camp’ lore” (376): “Flaming Creatures is a lovely specimen of what now . . . goes by the flippant name of ‘pop art.’ Smith’s film has the sloppiness, the arbitrariness, the looseness of pop art. It also has pop art’s gaiety, its ingenuousness, its celebrating freedom from moralism” (375). Finally, Sontag congratulated Mekas for “almost single-handedly [and with] tenacity and heroism” making it possible for a wider audience to see Smith’s film, hitherto “a cult object” known only to “a loyal coterie of filmmakers, poets and young Villagers” (374). Other early reviews offered similar praise. For instance, Ken Kelman, writing in reference to both Flaming Creatures and previews of Normal Love, observed: “Smith is [a] supreme photographer . . . both in black and white and previously unimaginable color, as well as the most poetic inspirer of actors and the greatest creator of soundtrack (that of Flaming Creatures is likely unequalled in all cinema)” (1964:492; see also Kelman 1963). The amoralism promoted in and through Flaming Creatures’ “intersexual, polymorphous joy” (Sontag 1964a:376) nonetheless divided the wider film community. In May 1964, Amos Vogel published a statement in the Village Voice (May 7), “Flaming Creatures Cannot Carry Freedom’s Torch,” accusing Mekas of “magnify[ing] to larger than life size . . . the reputations of many of his small group of 39

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independent film-makers . . . while rejecting or disregarding even the most adventurous contemporary artists of the international cinema” (1964:9). Vogel continued: In his single-minded pursuit of the “New American Cinema” . . . Jonas has become more dogmatic, more extremist, more publicity-conscious. While the flamboyancy and provocative extravagance of the positions taken has [sic] undoubtedly served to make at least one segment of the independent film movement more visible . . . it has [sic] also been accompanied by an absence of style and seriousness, a lack of concern for film form, rhythm, and theory[,] which leads many people to view the existing works and pretensions with an indulgent, amused air, smiling at the antics of the movement or somewhat repelled by the “camp” atmosphere of its screenings. (1964:9) For Vogel, Mekas’s attack on censorship (including the promotion of Flaming Creatures at Knokke-Le Zoute) amounted to no more than a “series of calculated provocations” (1964:9). No matter how worthy the cause, Mekas’s objective was, in Vogel’s opinion, undermined by both its tactics—“a guerrilla skirmish at the New Bowery Theater”—and the weaknesses of its paradigmatic test case: “Flaming Creatures is a valid and ‘felt’ work. But, alas, intentions and achievements are not synonymous, and Flaming Creatures, despite flashes of brilliance and moments of perverse, tortured beauty, remains a tragically sad film noir, replete with limp genitalia and limp art” (1964:9, 18). Vogel’s statement indicates that although he supported the repeal of obscenity laws and promotion of individual expression, he seriously doubted that a film like Flaming Creatures— “limp” and “unmasculine”—could “carry freedom’s torch” 40

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(Staiger 1999:57). This is consistent with later commentaries, which indicate that although other underground films of the 1960s—such as Rubin’s Christmas on Earth and Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1964–1967)—were far more explicit in their representations of sexual activity, it was the “blissful oblivion of traditional alignments of anatomy and gender roles” that made Flaming Creatures “more pernicious” than other films in the underground (Suárez 1996:185–86). Hoberman, for instance, quotes an evaluation by a U.S. senator— “that movie [Flaming Creatures] was so sick . . . I couldn’t even get aroused”—to demonstrate that the film’s “failure as pornography was something worse than pornography itself” (1997a:165). As Mark Siegel describes it, what made Smith’s film so threatening to the mainstream was not simply its depiction of “non-normative” sexuality and erotic diversity, but its refusal to explain its creatures, “to offer them up to knowledge”: “What was [really] under attack . . . was not simply the documentation of explicit (hetero- or even homo-) sexual acts, but the expression of an eroticism that might go unnamed [and unexplained]. . . . [Any acknowledgment of] the legitimacy of cultural expressions of perversity would . . . call into question the normalizing effects of the existing organization of erotic life” (1997:101). On June 12, 1964, things finally came to a head when Mekas and Jacobs were convicted of showing an obscene film and received suspended jail sentences (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:61; Hoberman 1997a:162). Reporting again from the pages of the Village Voice on June 18, Mekas wrote: “A verdict was passed in the New York Criminal Court last Friday that Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures is obscene. . . . In practical terms, what this means is this: From now on . . . it will be a crime to show [Flaming Creatures] . . . , either publicly or privately” (1972:141–42). Mekas wrote that he and others—including Sontag, filmmaker Shirley Clarke, and 41

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activist Allen Ginsberg—had put forward expert opinion at the trial to provide insight to the film’s meaning and art but that this testimony had been ignored in favor of judging Flaming Creatures according to “community standards.” Maintaining that such standards were “low and vulgar,” Mekas insisted that “the innocence and beauty of Jack Smith is [sic] so far above the so-called community standard that his work should be a privilege to view in our courts” (1972:143). In her account of the reception of Flaming Creatures in the 1960s, Janet Staiger writes that prior to the obscenity charges being laid, the underground cinema had been either associated with art (the Beat films) or treated with amused paternalism, but with Flaming Creatures the discourse shifted to serious debate, the underground now representing a political cause connected to the film’s depiction of sexuality (1999:55–56). Although the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court—People of the State of New York v. Kenneth Jacobs, Florence Karpf, and Jonas Mekas (388 U.S. 431, 432 [1967])— the exhibition of Flaming Creatures in the city of New York was effectively banned. Although centered in New York, the controversy over Flaming Creatures spilled over into screenings in other states and over several years: on April 1, 1965, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, confiscated Flaming Creatures during a screening sponsored by the Action Committee on Human Rights; on January 19, 1967, authorities seized a print of the film prior to its screening at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; on February 6, 1969, representatives of the prosecutor’s office halted a screening at a Notre Dame conference on pornography and censorship (for the details of these incidents, see Hoberman 1997a:162–65 and Johnson 2012:93–97). These actions, along with the protracted trial and defense of Flaming Creatures, brought it national attention, at once reinforcing its reputation as cult contraband but also working to alienate 42

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Smith: “It got away from him,” said Tony Conrad. “It became a cause” (in Jordan 2007). Years later Smith would complain that the identification of Flaming Creatures within discourses of censorship and high art had merely served to limit its potentiality. Asked in an interview by Sylvère Lotringer, “Uncle Fishook [sic] and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art,” how he came up with the idea to make Flaming Creatures, Smith replied: “I started making a comedy about everything that I thought was funny. . . . The first audiences were laughing from the beginning all the way through” (in Lotringer 1978:192). Gregory Markopoulos, who was present at early screenings, concurred: “When Flaming Creatures was first presented in New York City . . . it was received by the average film spectator with a considerable amount of merriment. . . . The audiences burst forth and roared, while the walls of censorship began to crack” (1964:41). The euphoria was, however, short-lived, Smith commenting with resentment: “But then that writing started—and it became a sex thing. It turned the movie into a magazine sex issue. . . . Then it fertilized Hollywood. . . . When they got through licking their chops over the movie there was no more laughter. There was dead silence in the auditorium. The film was practically used to destroy me” (in Lotringer 1978:192). In the years following the making of Flaming Creatures, Smith held no doubt that Mekas (the eponymous “Uncle Fishook” of Lotringer’s interview) had used the film to publicize the New York underground, sacrificing Smith and his film in the process: “Uncle Fishook [Mekas] wanted to have something in court at the time, it being so fashionable. The publicity. It was another way by which he could be made to look like a saint, to be in the position of defending something when he was really kicking it to death. . . . It inflated Uncle Fishook; it made his career; I ended up supporting him” (in Lotringer 1978:193). More significantly, when asked about his intention 43

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for Flaming Creatures, Smith observed that the meaning was determined by the film’s discursive surround, its uptake and use: “The way my movie was used—that was the meaning of the movie. . . . What you do with it [politically or] economically is what the meaning is. If it goes to support Uncle Fishook, that’s what it means” (in Lotringer 1978:193–94). Questioned about Sontag’s interpretation, Smith added that Sontag was “just as hypnotized” by Mekas as he was, and he declared all “critics [to be] handmaidens of the Lobster,” the spineless and cannibalistic embodiment of capitalism and consumer society (in Jordan 2007). An uncompromising personality, Smith never got over the resentment, and so his demonization of Mekas (the “Lucky Landlord”) and Mekas’s mausoleum Anthology Film Archives became foundational to Smith’s theater (Sitney 1997:69). Despite the limited availability and circulation of Flaming Creatures and the fact that Smith never fully completed another film, the reputation of the New York underground’s succès de scandale continued to grow through the 1970s and 1980s. The creation of the Plaster Foundation and the first major Smith retrospective at P.S. 1 Museum in 1997 provided Flaming Creatures with greater exposure than at any time since the mid-1960s. More recently, the film’s “floating hilarity” has been grounded in its conceptual elusiveness, its resistance to codification and conceptualization (Suárez 1996:187). In Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (1996), Juan A. Suárez argues that, unlike the psychodramas of Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, and James Broughton, which align gayness with sincerity, authenticity, and subjective truth, Flaming Creatures puts forward a nonessentialist conception of gayness in which there is “no subjective essence to be realized, no interiority where the self’s truth lies dormant” (191). Rather than propose a stable, gay sexuality as a precondition for (pre-Stonewall) activism, this interpretation 44

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argues that political action does not necessarily demand the isolation of a discernible “essence” or core of identity (193– 94). On the contrary, this very lack of stability—Flaming Creatures’ indeterminability—serves to “hinder the technologies of social institutions which seek to make the marginal concrete [by] locating it, knowing it, and subjugating it” (194). Smith’s film evades fixity, “projecting intersexuality, monosexuality, homosexuality, no sexuality, just sexuality” (Hoberman 1997a:165), and this performativity and presentation of “alternative” sexualities become a key factor in its cult reception (Grant 1991:129). Rather than legitimate Smith’s work solely on aesthetic grounds—that is, in relation to the categories “camp” and “trash”—these critical reevaluations of Flaming Creatures see its political dimension, recognizing in Smith’s artifice, his performance and self-fabrication, the possibility for creating a “more fabulous,” a more lived, social reality (Siegel 1997:92). If Flaming Creatures—not only Smith’s greatest but also his most notorious achievement—was lost to him, destroyed by the state’s labeling of it as obscene, then Smith’s response was to turn to more provisional works, such as his unfinished sequel, Normal Love, and to incorporate them into his extravagant live performances, where his anarchic imagination continued to flourish.

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3 THE FILM WORK: FLAMING CREATURES

Flaming Creatures mocks the devotees of glamour as it proclaims the faith. Faith flashes its neon promise as the flesh fails. Screeching queens circle a bobbling breast. God punishes the errant appetites: the roof caves in and the creatures are covered in plaster rubble. But Desire rises again, like Christ and Dracula, to sublimate into Eternal Moviedom. —Ken Jacobs, “Thanks for Explaining Me” (1998) In one of the first detailed descriptions of Flaming Creatures, Susan Sontag writes that the film has “no story . . . no development, no necessary order” but counts in it “seven clearly separable sequences” (1964a:375). She hastily adds, though: “Of no sequence is one convinced that it had to last this long, and not longer or shorter. Shots aren’t framed in the traditional way; heads are cut off; extraneous figures sometimes appear on the margin of the scene. The camera is hand-held most of the time, and the image often quivers” (375). P. Adams Sitney writes that Flaming Creatures “dispenses with plot . . . but retains the structure of the scene” and more precisely

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identifies “ten scenes which blend into one another with deliberately obscured boundaries” (1979:354). The roughly assembled elements of these ten sequences—amplified by the film’s insistent formal deficiencies—are such that the initial sequential nature of the images almost immediately falls apart into a circular nonnarrative montage of gestures. As Sitney describes it, the film’s overall “progression” is a ritualistic, circular “move[ment] toward and away from a central core of three episodes [numbered 4–6 in the subsequent list] in which the flaming creatures die in an orgy and after an interval are reborn” (1979:354). The ten sequences—which for the purpose of analysis1 can be further organized into the credits and three suprasegments—are as follows:

CREDITS The lengthy title sequence, underscored by an excerpt from the soundtrack of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Lubin, 1944).

I. PRESENTATION 1. The White Blossom Sequence, featuring Francis Francine and Delicious Delores and set to the rhumba tune “Amapola” from the 1930s. 2. The Smirching Sequence, or faux lipstick commercial, in which Francine, Delores, and other creatures enthusiastically apply “indelible lipstick” to their mouths. 3. The “China Nights” Sequence, in which Francine chases Delores and drags her down in front of the blossom tree.

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II. DEVASTATION 4. The ravishment of Delores by several creatures, a rape-orgy that culminates in a violent earthquake. 5. The quiet interlude in which Delores finds comfort in the arms of the Fascinating Woman. 6. The Coffin Sequence in which a blond, bewigged vampire, Our Lady of the Docks, emerges to reanimate the creatures to the tune of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” III. STIMULATION 7–8. The extended “Siboney” Sequence in which the revived creatures, including the Spanish Girl, dance and cavort. 9. The end sequence, announced by a sound grab of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and including the creature portrait featuring Marian Zazeela.

OPENING SEQUENCE Flaming Creatures begins with an extended (3.40-minute) title sequence that features three creatures—two (uncredited) dark-haired females dressed in black and a burly male creature, Arnold (Arnold Rockwell) with an eye mask, turban, and a white toga wrapped around his waist. Set to exotic music, dialogue, and sound effects sampled and looped from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the segment is the film’s most direct invocation of Smith’s muse, Maria Montez. As the music begins, the first shot—murky, gray, and out of focus— shows two of the creatures in medium long shot: one of the women, centered in the frame, hands raised to her temples pushing back her voluminous black hair, and the male 48

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creature, Arnold, to her right only barely visible in the grainy shot and against the white backdrop. Within moments, these two creatures are obscured as the second female moves in from out of field to be framed in close-up, one arm thrown back over her head. She sways to the music as the first female moves up behind her so that as the second retreats out of frame, the first is captured in close-up as the following exchange is heard: Today, Ali Baba comes. Ali Baba? Today . . . Ali Baba comes today. The dialogue—lifted from a scene in which Ali Baba (Jon Hall), disguised as a merchant, infiltrates the palace of the evil Hulagu Khan (Kurt Katch)—bridges an almost imperceptible cut to an extreme close-up of the first woman. Next, her exit

Figure 3.1: Opening sequence, Flaming Creatures (Smith, 1963). 49

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to the right of frame reveals the film’s main title—“Cinemaroc Nickelodeon presents Flaming Creatures”—done in an elaborately handwritten script on white card (designed by Zazeela) and mounted on the set’s white backdrop. Close-up shots of the creatures continue—one of the women taking off skimpy underwear, another pressing her lips into kisses, the masked male handling his cock—before a close-up of two creatures (man and woman) facing each other in close-up reveals a second and partially obscured “Cast” card behind them. Francis Francine Delicious Delores Our Lady of the Docks The Spanish Girl

Himself Sheila Bick Joel Markman Dolores Flores [Mario Montez] Arnold [Rockwood] Judith Malina

Arnold The Fascinating Woman and Maria Zazeela

Marian Zazeela

The third creature darts in front, obscuring the other two, before they all step back out of frame to reveal the entire cast of characters listed on the card. Processional music is heard as the creatures move back in and out and back in again. They embrace and—as harps and violins play the love theme from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves—drop out of field at the bottom of the frame. More close-ups continue—a shoe, a cock, a pair of puckered lips—before a cut reveals a final card that gives details of the principal crew. Photography Assistant Director Recording

Jack Smith Marc Schleifer Tony Conrad

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Special Assistant Facilities of

Dick Preston Windsor Theater

Again, the creatures move back and forth, obscuring the card, until a gong and final burst of music lead into the next segment.

The extended title sequence of Flaming Creatures exemplifies one of Smith’s major contributions to avant-garde aesthetics: his interest in prolonged temporality, exaggeration, postponement, and delay. Sitney writes that “Smith was a master of delay. . . . Against the backdrop of delay and anticipation his imagination shone most vividly”: “One remembers a full audience, packed into a dilapidated loft, waiting hours for a performance to begin as Smith puttered around or ran about in a tizzy adjusting a set or costume just off-stage while over and over again recordings narrating Jackie Kennedy’s childhood alternated with the life of St. Vincent de Paul” (1997:69). Theater director Richard Foreman provides a similar account, recalling Smith’s habit of “extend[ing] the wait between lines of dialogue to five, ten, twenty, minutes” (1992:142). The deliberate slowness, along with the continual and calculated mishaps that typified each performance, made the wait exhilarating and brought the audience into a state of present attention: “To watch Jack Smith perform was to watch human behavior turn into granular stasis, in which every moment of being seemed, somehow, to contain the seed of unthinkable possibility” (Foreman 1992:142). The writer-artist Gary Indiana describes the way in which this “junklike stasis” not only was central to Smith’s style and aesthetic but also manifested itself in other circumstances: “Jack lived in an apartment on First Avenue full of colorful garbage. He could spend hours

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readjusting some peripheral aspect of a pile of debris, puncturing long silences only with occasional cryptic non sequiturs about penguins or a startling piece of extremely bad nutritional advice” (1997:67). It should come as no surprise that upon seeking guidance on how to improve an early rehearsal of Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), the experimental theater director Robert Wilson was told by Smith, in his characteristic nasal drawl, “It has to be . . . sadder, Bob, it’s not saaad enough . . . make it . . . slow . . . er, much slow . . . er, just much slow . . . er” (in Foreman 1992:143, ellipses in original; see also Foreman in Reisman 1990–1991:76). The stuttering start to Flaming Creatures at once marks out not only Smith’s fascination with but also his resistance to Hollywood and its star system. The elaborate but largely illegible cursive script of the title card—“Cinemaroc Nickelodeon presents Flaming Creatures”—as well as of the cards that follow, providing details of cast and crew, at once celebrates and parodies the overblown title sequences of Hollywood movies. The faded celluloid and restricted tonal range present ephemeral, ghostlike images from some forgotten Hollywood, recalling Smith’s comment that Flaming Creatures “took place in a haunted movie studio” (in Lotringer 1978:196). In contrast to the work of some experimental filmmakers of the 1960s—“film poets” such as Brakhage, Markopoulos, and Robert Breer—which stood apart from and opposed to the commerce and conventions of Hollywood, Smith’s underground film work and that of others, such as Anger, Kuchar, and Warhol was not only informed by art forms and social-political developments outside of commercial film but nourished, too, by the dialogue they established with mainstream Hollywood film and the dominance of Hollywood imagery in mass culture (James 1989:141). Jacobs remembered: “We shared a terrific hunger for movies. . . . We lusted after nineteen-forties films by Universal . . . [especially those 52

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that] had atmosphere, a mise-en-scène about them and a nostalgic fantasy atmosphere” (quoted in Rowe 1982:39). Anticipating key attributes—nostalgic yearning and intertextual relay—that would contribute to Flaming Creatures’ cult reputation, Smith himself admitted, “My mind was filled with . . . Hollywood” (in Lotringer 1978:196): Unlike my colleagues in the avant garde cinema my experience and interests have been influenced not by literature or painting as much as by movies. I have tried to recreate the beauty and power of the secret raptures I first discovered in the Hollywood movies of my childhood. Maria Montez, The Arabian Nights, Casablanca and other “cult” films left me with an insatiable lust for a visceral fantasy that is both foreign and terrible. (quoted in Tartaglia 2001:41) Hoberman describes Smith as a “movie cultist,” someone who had absorbed the “poetry” of the Hollywood image and sought to re-create or resurrect it through his film work (1997a:156). In “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” (1962–1963), published in the pages of Film Culture along with a four-page spread of film and publicity stills of Montez and “Montez-land,” Smith expressed his “cult cinephilia” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:51), writing: “At this moment in movie history there is a feeling of movies being approved of. There is an enveloping cloud of critical happiness—it’s OK to love movies now” (29). In this same article, Smith declared himself a “film aesthete” (30) and proposed a personal canon of cult films—or “secret-flix”—that should be remembered because of their “peculiar haunting quality” (31): The whole gaudy array of secret-flix [consists] of any flic we enjoyed: Judy Canova flix (I don’t even remember 53

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the names), I Walked with a Zombie, White Zombie, Hollywood Hotel, all [Maria] Montez flix, most Dorothy Lamour sarong flix, a gem called Night Monster, Cat & the Canary, The Pirate, Maureen O’Hara Spanish Galleon flix (all Spanish Galleon Flix anyway), all Busby Berkeley flix, Flower Thief, all musicals that had production numbers, especially Rio de Janeiro prod. nos., all Marx Bros. flix. Each reader will add to the list. (31) In particular, Smith singled out the “primitive allure” of Maria Montez, the model and contract player born in the Dominican Republic whose breakthrough role was Scheherazade (simplified as “Sherazade” in the film’s titles) in Universal’s Technicolor production of Arabian Nights (Rawlins, 1942). Montez went on to considerable, if relatively brief, popularity, presiding over a series of colorful adventure pictures, including

Figure 3.2: Maria Montez in Cobra Woman (Siodmak, 1944). 54

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White Savage (Lubin, 1943), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman (Siodmak, 1944), Gypsy Wildcat (Neill, 1944), and Sudan (Rawlins, 1945). In the late 1940s, Montez formed a production company with then husband Jean-Pierre Aumont and moved to France, where in 1951, not yet forty years of age, she suffered a fatal heart attack. According to writer Ronald Tavel, Smith was working as an usher at the Orpheum Theater in Chicago in 1951 when news of Montez’s untimely death inspired the management to stage a retrospective. Tavel wrote: “It was there and then that Smith became familiar with the star whom he has since referred to as the Wonderful One or The Marvelous One. He felt that all the secrets of cinema lay in a careful study of [that] woman” (1966:101). Smith expressed his deep aesthetic commitment to Montez, and his film and theater work is loaded with references to specific Montez pictures. One of his earliest works, Buzzards Over Baghdad (shot in the early 1950s and later incorporated into Respectable Creatures, 1950– 1966), retells and takes its title from a climatic sequence from Arabian Nights, and Normal Love is said to be “a work that draws its look, its feel, its colors, images, and backyard fairy moth sheen directly from White Savage” (Tavel 1997:96). Tavel writes that Flaming Creatures not only lifts its opening sound bite from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves but also “alludes to the earthquake in both [Montez] color island epics [White Savage and Cobra Woman], the processional in Ali Baba, [and] MM’s personal Nubian slave in Arabian Nights.” The languorous posing of its creatures amounts to a set of “lesser printouts of the poster art for [Montez] films, and in particular of the most popular ones for which she invariably modeled . . . in alluring recumbent positions” (1997:96). Hoberman finds other evidence of Smith’s investment in the “cult of personality” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:81), such as Smith’s later performance piece What’s Underground About 55

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Marshmallows? (1981), which includes a “ritual citation” of Montez’s filmography (1997b:16–17). Finally, Tavel notes that in the late 1960s, when Smith occupied two floors of a loft in SoHo, he partially removed the floor/ceiling between them to construct a performance space and permanent shrine to Montez, one inspired by the sets of Raiders of the Desert (Rawlins, 1941), Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Tangier (Waggner, 1946) (1997:96). In the artist-writer David Reisman’s estimation, Smith’s investment in old Hollywood—in particular his diva worship of Montez—“gave rise to a generation’s interest in camp” (1990– 1991:61). The coordinates of Smith’s aesthetic—his nostalgia for objects “imperfect and ugly” (Malanga 1967:13)—were most famously theorized by Sontag, whose defense of Flaming Creatures, “A Feast for Open Eyes” (1964a), anticipated her influential essay “Notes on Camp” (1966). Sontag locates the “essence of Camp [in] its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (1966:275). Although she insists that the “camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized” (277), her assertion that camp’s “mode of aestheticism” is not one of beauty, but of “artifice, of stylization” (277), “affinity for . . . all the elements of visual décor[,] . . . emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content” (278), and a “hallmark . . . spirit of extravagance” (283), works to align the concept of “camp” with Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Indeed, Sontag goes even further, implicitly identifying Smith’s notion of “secret-flix” by stating that movie criticism— “like lists of ‘The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen’ ”—is the “greatest popularizer of Camp taste today” (278). Sontag even privileges one of Smith’s key influences: “Camp,” she writes, “is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich” (283). Sontag seems to provide a summary description of Smith’s aesthetic, but, as Michael Moon points out, that description 56

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largely depoliticizes Smith’s broader political project and cultural critique (1995:289). Nayland Blake provides a corrective, pointing to the activist dimension of camp: Camp, as Jack Smith practiced it, is an attitude of profound seriousness and connoisseurship directed at an inappropriate subject. Thus, it parodies notions of scholarship and cultural value. . . . Camp carves out a place of cultural refuge, if not resistance. . . . In the arts, the era of the late fifties and early sixties was one of great public play, but it was play conducted with steely determination. For queer artists, camp was a prime tool in that play. (1997:180–81; see also Muñoz 2009:169–73) Suárez develops this idea, explaining how a camp sensibility reached out for mainstream commercial objects on the verge of obsolescence—in this case, unfashionable Hollywood movies of the recent past—and through nostalgia and playful allusion invested them with gay subcultural resonance. More than this, Suárez advances an understanding of how this camp attitude overlapped with cultism: “Both [camp and cult] construct their pleasures from ‘degraded’ objects of commercial culture. . . . In both cases, audiences refashioned and reproduced original objects according to their own expressive needs. Camp is, in fact, a particular type of cultism that selects its fetishes on the basis of gender ambiguity and stylistic excess” (1996:132, emphasis added). Smith’s Superstars of Cinemaroc extend the aura of forgotten screen idols—in particular, the creation of drag performer Mario Montez as a projection of kaleidoscopic daydreams of Maria Montez. In a similar way, two of Warhol’s collaborations with Tavel—Harlot (1964) and Hedy (1966), both of which star Mario Montez—are irreverent evocations of (fallen) Hollywood stars Jean Harlow and Hedy Lamarr, respectively. In Smith’s case, the marginal 57

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status of unfashionable cult films and Maria Montez’s “bad” acting become a perfect screen on which to project a subculture’s struggle and alienation and to express transgressive or “deviant” sexualities and forbidden desires.

WHITE BLOSSOM SEQUENCE In contrast to the hazy, overexposed, and often disorienting opening, the next segment begins with a carefully composed midshot profile of Francis Francine (playing himself), outfitted in a white brocade dress, elbow-length gloves, and ornate turban hat and attentively sniffing a small bouquet of longstemmed, white lilies. Francine rotates to his right, inhaling deeply and with satisfaction as he recognizes someone out of field. An eye-line match reveals Delicious Delores (Sheila Bick), contrastingly attired in a black camisole dress and floppy black hat. She stands in front of the film’s principal backdrop, the oversize painting of a large white vase brimming with sprigs of almond blossom. Center frame, the vase dominates the composition, with Delores standing to the left of it, leaning out to her left, hand on her head, face partially hidden behind a black fan. There follow a shot of Francine sniffing a lily and a cut back to Delores, who, now with her back to the camera and hands raised over her head, sways gently to the musical accompaniment, “Amapola (Pretty Little Poppy),” as sung by Deanna Durbin for the film First Love (Koster, 1939). A shot-reverse-shot sequence first shows Francine waving and then cuts back to a medium long shot of Delores. Francine enters from right of frame, whereupon the couple greet, pinch cheeks, and embrace. In contrast to the tight framing and camera movements of the previous sequence, the compositions here are studied and deliberate, “each gesture . . . slow, subtle, and deeply felt” (Packman 1977:53). As “Amapola” draws to its end and Durbin hits the song’s highest note, 58

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Figure 3.3: White Blossom Sequence, Flaming Creatures.

there follow two oblique and somewhat disorienting transitional shots of Delores and her waving fan, filmed through a heavily patterned black arabesque. Consisting of just ten shots, the White Blossom Sequence is the most deliberate and conventionally composed scene in Flaming Creatures, unfolding in a clearly delineated space. Positioned early in the film—between the delirium of the opening credits and the bedlam of the Smirching Sequence— the White Blossom Sequence speaks to Smith’s careful planning and casual mastery of classical Hollywood style and (teasingly) provides a brief respite ahead of the raging storm to come. The first eight shots of the sequence alternate in classical style between midshots and long shots of Francine and Delores, each player initially occupying his or her own space and then (from shot 6) pictured with each other in a single space. These shots—in which Francine and Delores pose, resplendent and self-absorbed—seem to affirm René Ricard’s 59

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assertion that Smith always wanted to be a fashion photographer, albeit an unconventional one: “None of his [Smith’s] fashion photos have surfaced. Of course his best stills are like fashion shots—but fashion shots from another civilization” (1997:68). Indeed, it seems that at one time Smith was obsessed with publishing his photographs in Vogue, and his patron, Isabel Eberstadt (who was married to fashion photographer Frederick Eberstadt), even arranged an appointment for him with an art director at the magazine (Eberstadt 1997:115). Smith’s temperament made any such arrangement impossible, however, as did the fact that his photographs— although in some ways conventionally fashionable—were often populated with outrageous drag queens and seminude performers. Drag is a big part of Flaming Creatures’ celebration of the powers of excess and fabulation, but it is also about empowerment insofar as drag’s “useless” expenditure and waste of time are a way to resist the logic of capitalist accumulation: a logic of success and failure. The use of Francis Francine (a.k.a. Frank di Giovanni) is striking in this respect, his creation in Flaming Creatures apparently taking its inspiration from one of Smith’s secret-flix: The Pirate, directed by Vincente Minnelli (1948). A musical romance, The Pirate tells the story of Manuela (Judy Garland), a young woman who finds herself promised to the wealthy but elderly Don Pedro (Walter Slezak) in a marriage arranged by her aunt Inez (Gladys Cooper). All the while, Manuela is more interested in a handsome young traveling player, Serafin (Gene Kelly), who poses as the legendary pirate Macoco to further stimulate her interest in him. All ends happily, but Smith likely took less interest in the film’s narrative conceit than in its colorful and plainly fabricated set pieces—such as an early balcony scene in which against a painted sky, Manuela, in a yellow-and-black, off-the-shoulder, puffy-sleeved frock and oversize tartan beret, is surrounded by 60

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Figure 3.4: Manuela (Judy Garland) and Aunt Inez (Gladys Cooper) in The Pirate (Minnelli, 1948).

five ladies-in-waiting, each of whom sports her own elaborate headwear—and its extravagant musical numbers, such as the pirate ballet in which Kelly, as Serafin, dances out his fantasy as Macoco (Kelly’s costume and deportment likely also provided inspiration for Smith’s personage “Sinbad Glick”). Of at least equal interest is Manuela’s statuesque aunt Inez, dressed head to toe in (near) black, complete with turbaned hat and veil. Although Inez was played “straight” by Gladys Cooper, who later in her career often took on the roles of aristocratic elderly women, her haughty posing—arched eyebrow and elevated chin, outstretched arms and nodding approvals—and uncanny resemblance make her a mirrorimage fashion prototype for Francine. The emphasis on gender performativity and nonnormative sexuality is a key aspect of Flaming Creatures’ cult reputation, and toward the end of 61

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the film the antinomy of Francine’s white costume and Delores’s black dress will find its parallel in the thrilling taffeta black of the Spanish Girl and the breathless lily white of the Fascinating Woman. If the stark presentation of Francine and Delores, artfully composed against the background of the outsize vase of blossoms, harnesses the celebratory powers of excess and imagination associated with drag and cult film, then the final two shots of the White Blossom Sequence are more evidently invested in the baroque stylization that Smith much admired (Rinder 1997:139). A key influence on Smith’s elaborate and deftly composed still photography of the period was film director Josef von Sternberg, in particular the six films he made at Paramount with Marlene Dietrich: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935). Just as he had with Montez’s films, Smith took a special interest in the primacy of style in von Sternberg’s films: their absolute devotion to surfaces and their irreverent subordination of plot devices to the visual image. More than this, von Sternberg had cast Dietrich “between angel and devil[,] . . . [as a] goddess, empress, adventuress” (I. Smith 2018), and had placed her in ever more exotic and lavish settings—his own eccentric versions of Morocco, China, Spain, and (twice) Russia—with only a single excursion to contemporary America (in Blonde Venus). Smith was no doubt also drawn to Dietrich’s unique and idiosyncratic acting style and screen persona, created (like Montez’s) through makeup, costumes, expressions, voice, and gestures: Dietrich was an artist whose artwork was herself. . . . As a performer, she bypassed the usual standards by which acting [was] judged; naturalism and psychological realism were never her aims. She pooh-poohed the 62

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Method. . . . At times, she freely admitted, her acting was choreographed to an inner metronome. . . . If this makes her, at her worst, mechanical—her eyelids seeming to move on springs like those of a doll—at her best she brings a deep musicality, a sense of timing, modulation, and inflection that is calibrated to an expert knowledge of lighting and camera work. (I. Smith 2018) Smith outlined his enthusiasm for von Sternberg’s total devotion to visual texture at the expense of plot in his short Film Culture essay “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” (1963–1964a). He bemoaned the fact that “in this country [a] movie is known by its story. . . . Good story—good movie. Unusual story— unusual movie, etc. Nobody questions this. . . . In this country the blind go to the movies” (4). It was for this reason, Smith claimed, that “von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even tho they already had them inherent in the image. What he did was make movies naturally—he lived in a visual world. The explanations plots [sic] [were something] he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films” (4). Accordingly, von Sternberg is said to have neglected the words—“let them be corny & ridiculous”—and instead worked with Dietrich’s androgynous sexual presence— famously, in Morocco she performs at a local nightclub dressed in top hat and tails and plants a kiss full on the lips of a woman—to achieve “the richest, most alive, most right images of the world’s cinema” (4). In a passage that seems almost autobiographical, Smith wrote: His expression was of the erotic realm—the neurotic gothic deviated sex-colored world and it was a turning inside out of himself and magnificent. You had to use your eyes to know this tho because the soundtrack babbled inanities . . . to cover up the visuals. . . . In the 63

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visuals she was . . . V.S. himself. A flaming neurotic— nothing more nothing less. . . . Dietrich was his visual projection—a brilliant transvestite in a world of delirious unreal adventures. Thrilled by his/her own movement— by superb taste in light, costumery, textures, movement, subject and camera, subject/camera/revealing faces—in fact all revelation but visual revelation. (1963–1964a:4–5) Flaming Creatures aside, the influence of von Sternberg’s aesthetic is most evident in Smith’s interior, black-and-white photography of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which, as Lawrence Rinder points out, exhibits a strong sense of “Sternberg’s cluttered, shallow space, his veils and mirrors, his chiaroscuro and dramatic overhead lighting, and his sense of theatrical body language and gesture. The space of Smith’s

Figure 3.5: Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg, 1934). 64

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images is literally heaped with people and props, and the only relief from the clutter is in the shadows cast from one object onto another” (1997:143). In the period leading up to the filming of Flaming Creatures, Smith produced numerous smallformat prints, sixteen of which were planned as a four-page spread, 16 Immortal Photographs, for publication in Film Culture (Rinder 1997:144). The project never went ahead, but the photo sessions provided material for The Beautiful Book (J. Smith [1962] 2002), a limited, handmade edition assembled by Smith and his associates during the late spring and early summer of 1962, just before shooting began on Flaming Creatures. Published by the poet Piero Heliczer’s Dead Language Press in an edition of two hundred copies, The Beautiful Book comprises nineteen hand-tipped black-and-white contact prints (2¼ × 2¼ inches in dimension), glued without captions on muted yellow pages. Most of the photographs date from the winter of 1962, although a few are earlier, including the final “signature” shot, a portrait of Smith taken by Jacobs on the steps beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Nearly half the photographs feature Zazeela, who also provided the intricate design for the book’s silk-screened cover and for whom Smith had developed a passionate attachment. The portraits of Zazeela alternate with portraits of several other models— including Frank di Giovanni (a.k.a. Francis Francine), Joel Markman, René Rivera (a.k.a. Mario Montez), and Arnold Rockwood (a.k.a. Pasty Arnold)—all of whom would also appear in Flaming Creatures. The portrait shots that make up The Beautiful Book— especially those of Zazeela (taken during the almost weekly shooting sessions at Smith’s Lower East Side apartment in the fall of 1961 through June 1962) in various states of undress and posed in sexually suggestive scenes—directly prefigure the cinematography of Flaming Creatures. For instance, one especially overexposed shot features Mario Montez, dressed 65

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in dark hat and frock, seated to the right of Zazeela, who, with back to the camera, is posed in front of a mirror, naked but for an elaborate feathery headdress. Zazeela’s arms and limbs are entangled with Rockwood’s naked body, the heavy fruit of his cock visible at the bottom left-hand corner of frame. The exposure and composition in this shot is not dissimilar to the overexposed opening of Flaming Creatures, in which “the narrowing of the tonal range [due to the washed-out images] obscures the sense of depth, which Smith capitalizes on by cluttering the frame with actors and with details of limbs, breast, a penis, and puckered lips so that not only depth disappears but the vertical and horizontal coordinates as well” (Sitney 1979:354). In a different example, the two highcontrast shots that conclude the White Blossom Sequence— Delores, obliquely framed through an elaborately carved screen—resemble two photos of Zazeela in The Beautiful Book: in one, she poses hands to her temples, her face partially obscured by a large lily; in the other, she is naked, hands above her breasts, her face again obscured, this time by a black, embroidered veil draped over her head. In both cases, the images—photography and film—weave their way back to Byzantium via von Sternberg’s secret-flix, in particular a shot from The Scarlet Empress in which Dietrich (after giving birth to an heir) is dramatically pictured through a black gauze screen, in close-up and deliriously out of focus.

SMIRCHING SEQUENCE Violin music provides a sound bridge to the Smirching Sequence, presented (in and through the film’s only substantial stretch of nonsynchronized dialogue) as a faux radio commercial for lipstick. Francine appears in an extreme close-up, applying lipstick as a voice-over, apparently supplied by Mario

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Figure 3.6: Smirching Sequence, Flaming Creatures.

Montez (Siegel 2014a:363–64), carefully enounces “a fabulous new heart-shaped lipstick that shapes your lips as it colors them.” As the announcer’s voice continues—“no more blurring, no feathery edges, because this lipstick is pointed and curved like a heart”—a jump cut reveals Delores luxuriously applying the same type of lipstick, and then a shot shows both creatures (Francine and Delores) severely cropped at left and right of frame, with a third creature, boasting a large fake nose, crouched between them at the very bottom of the frame. As the commercial continues—the violin now plaintively playing the tune “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” a Tin Pan Alley hit of the late 1910s and early 1920s—the announcer extolls the virtues of “five new romantic shades: pink that is the heart of pink, red that is the soul of red, . . . pure peach, luscious cherry.” The creatures are shown in various poses and angles, reclined and entangled but singularly absorbed in

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the task of applying thick layers of lipstick. The announcer’s lines—“A lipstick creamy, moisturizing, indelible. Smoke, drink, kiss, without leaving a trace”—are interrupted with a question (in the high-pitched voice of Jack Smith): “Is there a lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cocks?” The prim answer—“A man is not supposed to have lipstick on his cock. It’s supposed to be indelible”—is accompanied by more close-ups and panning shots of creatures as well as close-ups and exaggerated sounds of smacking lips. The creature with the false nose is picked out, studiously applying his lipstick and completely oblivious to a small, dark cock sitting over his right shoulder. As the violin music ends, a repeated shot of a waggling cock leads to two overexposed tableaux shots of the creatures—Francine, Delores, and others—leaning in front of the white blossom, in each case one of them slowly sliding, falling to the floor. The opening notes of the song “China Nights” transition to the next sequence. In his list of secret-flix, Smith mentions Marx Brothers movies: not a single film, but “all Marx. Bros. flix” (1962– 1963:31), and one can imagine Smith’s enthusiasm for the anarchic antics of the string of early Marx Brothers features at Paramount: The Cocoanuts (Florey and Santley, 1929), Animal Crackers (Heerman, 1930), Monkey Business (McLeod, 1931), Horse Feathers (McLeod, 1932), and Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933). It seems only a short step from the Marx Brothers across to the musical comedy of Eddie Cantor, another performer who transitioned from the vaudeville stage to early talking pictures—although Smith never named him directly. Of particular interest—and, indeed, featured on the front cover of the special “American Directors” issue of Film Culture 28 (1963)—is Roman Scandals (Tuttle, 1933), the fourth and most lavish of Cantor’s Samuel Goldwyn musical comedies of the 1930s, this one with choreography by Busby Berkeley, who

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is also name-checked in Smith’s list of secret-flix. The story follows the fortunes of Eddie (Cantor), who finds himself transported from small-town, Depression-era West Rome, United States, to mythical ancient Rome. Eddie, who is purchased in a slave market by Josephus (David Manners), helps his master not only in his romantic pursuit of the beautiful princess Sylvia (Gloria Stuart) but also in his endeavor to uncover the emperor’s (Edward Arnold) corruption of the Senate. The story reaches its climax with a riotous chariot chase sequence before Eddie, transported back to West Rome, remembers that he has evidence that will convict the corrupt local city officials. Roman Scandals features several stylistically distinct production numbers, including a rousing rendition (and reprise) of “Build a Little Home,” in which Eddie sings to the evicted townsfolk of the unimportance of commodities, and a trademark Berkeley revue number—“No More Love”—sung by Ruth Etting and danced by the Goldwyn Girls, with a specialty solo dance by Grace Poggi, complete with lavish sets and slave beauties chained to huge pillars, naked but for their long blond tresses. Particularly relevant for the Smirching Sequence is the episode in which Eddie goes to an all-female bathhouse to alert the Britton princess, Sylvia, of a plot to poison her. In this segment, which leads to the song “Keep Young and Beautiful,” Eddie is disguised by a mud facial that not only allows him to be mistaken for the “Ethiopian beauty consultant” who has come to impart secrets of ever-lasting loveliness but also provides an alibi for the blackface routine that follows. Shot in pre-Code Hollywood, the bathhouse sequence—like the slave-market scene of “No More Love”— features numerous seminude, blond-bewigged Goldwyn Girls, here attended to by their black female slaves in the bathhouse. Asked by two blond cuties if he can offer some

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beauty hints, Eddie in his guise as consultant replies, “Well, all I can tell you is,” and then in lilting rhyme: Athletics, cosmetics, a weighing machine Are part of the feminine daily routine For what? And oceans of lotions and potions you take To keep that old something or other awake Why not? This leads to lines that are sung, with Cantor’s signature mugging and rolling of eyes: Even after you grow old, baby You don’t have to be a cold baby Keep young and beautiful It’s your duty to be beautiful Keep young and beautiful If you wanta be loved, dah-dah, dah-dah As the song builds momentum, some of the lyrics are picked out by the blond beauties, either as solos or in duets: Be sure and get your man Wrap your body in a coat of tan Keep young and beautiful If you want to be loved You’ll always have your way If he likes you in a negligee Keep young and beautiful If you want to be loved Most directly relevant for the indelible-lipstick commercial of the Smirching Sequence, though, are the following four lines: 70

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In using or choosing a lipstick Use the kind that won’t leave any mark Use the kind that’ll make both his lips stick When he kisses you in the dark Cantor’s next four lines—“Get him to hold you tight / Let him get a whiff of Christmas night / And keep young and beautiful / If you wanta be loved”—lead to the big production number and eventually to Eddie’s exposure, upon which he is chased into and fittingly sinks to “the bottom of the pool.” There is much in “Keep Young and Beautiful” that Smith would have found interesting, not just the lipstick lyric, which includes a slang reference to oral sex (“a kiss in the dark”) (Routt and Thompson 1990:31), but also the exotic, fabricated setting and the exaggerated femininity of the Goldwyn Girls, who apply thick layers of makeup and lipstick. At least one

Figure 3.7: Goldwyn Girls in Roman Scandals (Tuttle, 1933). 71

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contemporary reviewer of Flaming Creatures could (at least implicitly) see the connection, describing the Smirching Sequence as a “Roman bath without water, an aviary of limp creatures” (Conover 1964:9). More than this, Smith might have noted the politics of a set piece in which Eddie instructs the group of women on how to best commodify themselves (Routt and Thompson 1990:24). Although not exactly a political activist, Smith resisted the morally and aesthetically stifling effects of American postwar capitalist society. In this respect, the frame story for Roman Scandals—in which Eddie takes on the wealthy and powerful landlords of West Rome in order to aid the common folk in resisting their evictions— would also have struck a chord. As Suárez explains, Smith’s “moldy aesthetic”—his interest in dated kitsch and urban refuse—can (in part) be understood as an antidote to and stance against the expansion of postwar multinational capital (1996:201, 203–12; see also Rinder 1997:139). Smith lived in SoHo from the late 1950s and suffered from the gradual transformation of the neighborhood, something that had in part been facilitated by local artists whose wellpublicized lifestyles and performance scenes had transformed working-class industrial districts into bohemian enclaves (Suárez 1996:205). This gentrification—the refurbishment and conversion of lofts, tenements, and warehouses into high-rent apartments—was what Smith named “landlordism” (Suárez 1996:206). This gentrification and inflation of real estate prices were in turn related to the institutionalization of the avant-garde and specifically to Mekas’s endeavor to bring attention to and sponsorship for Anthology Film Archives through such strategies as the promotion (and, according to Smith, the exploitation) of Flaming Creatures. From where Smith stood—in his crumbling, cold-water apartment—these actions turned Mekas into a “landlord profiteer of the avantgarde,” and so Mekas became an ongoing target of abuse, 72

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depicted in Smith’s theater programs as “Uncle Fishhook” and “the Lucky Landlord,” and the underground he presided over was “the rented world” and “lucky landlord paradise” (Suárez 1996:207; see also Lotringer 1978). If the frame story of Roman Scandals ends with the explicit depiction of a utopian community from which “lucky landlords” have been expelled, then the central dream of ancient Rome—which takes up the majority of the film’s running time—connects more broadly to a surrealist notion that cinema has the potential to reveal a more fantastic world, a daily life unencumbered by the banality of reality. The film critic Adrian Martin writes that the surrealists of the 1920s took this type of interest in film, discovering in the great works of silent filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton a privileged way of getting to what André Breton called “absolute reality” or “the marvelous”: “a daily life freed from the stranglehold of the ‘reality principle,’ and invaded by the forces of love[,] [dreams, and] the unconscious” (1993:193). Robert Short similarly notes the surrealists’ love for the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers: an interest in the way the Marx Brothers kept a sight gag going well into the sound era, in their cartoonlike behavior, in Groucho and Chico’s dysfunctional dialogue, and in Harpo’s unbound and unpredictable lechery (2002:173). One can imagine a similar enthusiasm for Cantor’s flight through ancient Rome and especially in the “Keep Young and Beautiful” sequence in which Eddie, renamed Oedipus, is first mistaken for a white woman when the mud facial is applied, then transformed into a black man as he plasters mud to his legs and arms, and finally, when literally exposed (his pasty white thighs revealed under his tunic during the big dance number), transformed into a black child as he tries to take refuge in a steam cabinet. The sequence ends when (little) Eddie, pursued by the women, plunges into the milky bathing waters, from which he briefly surfaces as 73

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himself—a white man—before sinking to the bottom of the pool. As described here, surrealist cinema consists of more than a historical body of work and can be extended to take in those films—such as the Hollywood movies mentioned earlier—that can be viewed or reworked in the manner of a surrealist ethnography (see Clifford 1988:188). Of particular interest in this respect is the collagist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell, who was roughly contemporaneous with the French surrealists of the 1920s and who shared their fascination with American popular culture. Cornell was an early influence on Smith, and his interest in film was reflected in his “own brand of cultism.” Works such as his early essay “ ‘Enchanted Wanderer’: Excerpt from a Journey Album for Hedy Lamarr” (Cornell [1941–1942] 1991) are said to have provided a link between historical surrealism and the underground of the 1960s (Suárez 1996:120–21). In the 1950s and 1960s, Cornell made several films in collaboration with experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan, but he is best known for his short film Rose Hobart, first screened by gallery owner Julien Levy in New York in December 1936. Rose Hobart is essentially a found-footage film, a reediting of a jungle melodrama titled East of Borneo (Melford, 1931), starring Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford. A tribute to the screen presence of Hobart, Cornell’s film disregards spatial and temporal continuity to dis-order a series of shots of the actress, in an exotic, largely nocturnal landscape, reacting to off-screen events or in dialogue with actors who have been edited out. The shots have been spliced together so as to “accentuate the film’s fragmentariness,” but preservation curator Scott Simmon adds that Cornell made additional alterations when screening the film that (like the use of sound in Scotch Tape and Flaming Creatures) gave its fragments “a strange coherence”: “[Cornell] 74

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showed the black-and-white film through a piece of colored glass. He turned off the sound and projected it at so-called ‘silent speed’ [that is, sixteen to eighteen frames per second]. . . . [And] he provided musical accompaniment in the form of Brazilian samba records [‘Corrupção,’ ‘Porte Alegre,’ and other numbers from the album Holiday in Brazil by Nestor Amaral and His Continentals] bought from a remainder bin” (n.d.). For Smith, the direct connection to Rose Hobart came through Jacobs, who had worked briefly with Cornell while making Star Spangled to Death and had borrowed a print of Rose Hobart, which he and Smith viewed repeatedly: “We looked at [Rose Hobart] again and again, and we were both knocked out. . . . We looked at it in every possible way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a blue filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy” (Jacobs quoted in Sitney 1979:349). Sitney maintains that whatever Smith gained from seeing Rose Hobart is “a matter of speculation” (1979:353), and Smith did not follow (except for in his music sampling) in Cornell’s foundfootage tradition, which was taken up most notably by Bruce Conner in A Movie (1958) and other works. Nonetheless, Smith’s writings on Montez and von Sternberg, which emphasize the power and sensuality of visuals over narrative, seem entirely consistent with Rose Hobart’s critique: that “Hollywood fails in its banal screenplays, not its raw images” (Simmon n.d.). Such an evaluation is supported by Julien Levy’s comment (a near paraphrase of Smith’s railings against narrative) on the specific charm of Rose Hobart: “It is never the plot of such a film that should receive attention, but rather the wealth of innuendo which accompanies each action and which forms an emotional pattern far richer than that of the usual straight story to which our mind is accustomed” (quoted in 75

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Hammond 1991:19). Like Cornell and the surrealists, Smith looked back upon the moldy artifacts of the Hollywood studios and salvaged from the movies of popular screen idols— Lamarr and Hobart, Dietrich and Montez—a fascination akin to a surrealist dream logic: “Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light” (Cornell [1941–1942] 1991:222).

“CHINA NIGHTS” SEQUENCE As the “China Nights” Sequence begins, a static composition shows Francine dominating the left half of the frame (with his left-hand forefinger raised to his cheek), Delores (only just visible) reclined at bottom right, and between them (in imitation of

Figure 3.8: “China Nights” Sequence, Flaming Creatures. 76

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a shot from Blonde Cobra) the bare foot of the third creature, extended forward, revealing a dirty sole. Several extreme close-ups alternate between Francine and Delores before the volume drops and there is an abrupt cut to Delores running in front of the white blossom with Francine in pursuit. In his interview with Gerard Malanga, Smith refers to Mack Sennett’s chase sequences—“so beautifully done” (Malanga 1967:14)— and in Flaming Creatures the chase, likewise accelerated and cartoonlike, continues back and forth in front of the camera until Francine apprehends Delores, grabbing her around the neck and pulling her to the floor as she silently screams and waves her fan.

ORGY- EARTHQUAKE SEQUENCE As Delores’s cries become audible, Francine pulls out her generous white breast, and she is set upon by a group of creatures who begin to ravish her. Delores’s distress is most evident in her writhing screams and is amplified by the movement of her wildly flickering fan. An incongruous close-up shows Delores’s own unhurried undoing of her camisole shoulder strap before an even tighter close-up of her madly jiggling breast becomes little more than an accelerated blur. The point of view shifts to an initially disorienting wider, overhead shot that shows the creatures pulling up Delores’s dress, one of them slithering up between her legs. At this point, the song “China Nights” becomes almost inaudible, the camera cutting away to a swaying Japanese lantern, against which is heard the ominous sound of thunder. The camera begins to shake uncontrollably. Bells toll as the creatures—shot from above—tangle and writhe in evergreater orgiastic frenzy, even as they are showered in drifts of plaster dust. The creatures continue to assail Delores, but the frenzy has become infectious, and one of their own 77

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Figure 3.9: Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, Flaming Creatures.

kind—a dark-haired creature in a long, white, thrift-shop dress—is now also being ravished. The camera returns to the shaking lantern and then to a comical close-up of one dark-haired creature, his pointed tongue licking and devouring another’s toes. This close-up, too, becomes an abstraction as the camera shakes uncontrollably. Wild screams and howls—“recalling the Coney Island horror house” (Packman 1977:54)—are heard, and with the tight framing and swerving camera many of the images (and the cuts between shots) are legible as little more than a tangle of limbs. Abruptly, the sound is cut, and an overhead shot shows the creatures decelerated, spent and strewn across the floor. Smith’s cultist, retro aesthetic—his nostalgia for “moldy things . . . imperfect and ugly” (Smith in Malanga 1967:16)—is evident not only in his list of secret-flix but also in his inspired selection of dated, scratchy recordings for the soundtrack of

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Flaming Creatures. Indeed, Amy Taubin speculates that Smith’s decision not to recut and reassemble Flaming Creatures in his performance reels (as he did with subsequent work) was out of respect for Conrad’s “amazingly collaged score, which, anchoring every false start, every tease, every mockery of desire in place, rallies just in time to send the audience dancing up the aisle” (1997:40). The White Blossom Sequence dramatically employs Deanna Durbin’s First Love version of “Amapola (Pretty Little Poppy),” a song first recorded in the 1920s and a number-one hit for the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra (with vocals by Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberly) in 1941. In the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, the initial close-ups of Francine and Delores and the madcap chase that lead into the ravishment/orgy unfold against the high-pitched vocals of “China Nights” (“Shina no yoru”) as sung by Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi for the Japanese melodrama China Night (Fushimizu, 1940), which takes place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Conrad says that he was skeptical about Smith’s choice of what he thought “hopelessly derivative, retro music” for Flaming Creatures but later admitted the results were compelling: “just wonderful” (2006:62). In this respect, Conrad’s reaction was not unlike his earlier response to a request from Smith that Conrad extend an old 78-rpm record of Eddy Duchin’s “Carinhoso” (1941) into a live (taped) accompaniment to a screening of the three-minute-long film Scotch Tape: I was so disheartened by his choice of music, which was nothing sophisticated at all: Eddy Duchin, the piano player, playing a rumba or a samba. I recorded the disk and cut the tape together. . . . The tape recorder was placed at the front of the theater under the screen, and when the movie began, I turned on the tape—and the experience was stunning! It was incredible! And I

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realized that I needed to understand what had happened to convert such pedestrian sound into something completely magical in the context of the image, and what was going on with the picture that in the context of that sound it should have become so lambent and affecting. (2006:61, emphasis in original) The strategy here recalls Cornell’s “vandalization” of Rose Hobart: the way in which the original dialogue and mood music were replaced by the incongruous use of samba rhythms in a surrealist attempt to derange the static, theatrical naturalism of talking pictures (Hammond 1991:20–21). In Conrad’s description of Flaming Creatures, the “sound defect” was encountered as “a peak moment—an epiphany” (2006:61), one brought about by the allegorical and constructed nature of the sound–image juxtaposition. The chaotic mise-en-scène of the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence—writhing creatures, frantically swaying lantern, piles of plaster dust—is a “ruinous” and deliberately inept replaying of similar sequences from the films of Hall and Montez, such as the scene in which the earthquake topples the temple in White Savage. It is also an expression of the trash aesthetic developed by Smith during his period of collaboration with Jacobs and, like the camp–cultism connection previously outlined, represents “a distinctly political position, an opposition to or critique of the prevailing ideology and ethos of [an] American capitalist culture [of consumption]” (Joseph 2008:235). Invoking the idea of underground film as a wartime resistance movement, Jacobs recalled: “I was interested in social indictment. . . . Jack and I would deface posters in the subway, which I called ‘counter-desecration.’ . . . While there was no hope of a real revolution, there could be this playful revolution—a mischievous, little-boy revolution” (in MacDonald 1998:368, 370). 80

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In his expansive “minor” history of Tony Conrad (and the arts after Cage), Branden W. Joseph writes that Jacobs and Smith’s “little-boy revolution” was “a Beat-like refusal of the demands of ‘responsible’ adult (Oedipal) normality” (2008:239) and as such was an extension of the cultural change that had been fermenting since the late 1950s and early 1960s (Carney 1995:202). Sitney describes one of Smith’s secret-flix— Ron Rice’s first excursion into the Beat mode, The Flower Thief (1960), which featured Taylor Mead as a coffeehouse poet wandering through the unrestrained living of San Francisco’s North Beach—as “the purest expression of the beat [sic] sensibility in cinema” (1979:313). Rice’s later and most ambitious film, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963), was a three-hour (unfinished) epic featuring Mead, again in a variation of his Flower Thief persona (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983:44–45; Barnes 1993:161). David E. James offers a description of a scene in The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man that (but for the pronouns) could just as easily be applied to the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence: “Broadly farcical . . . Sheba unwinds in interior scenes in which Taylor Mead and the more or less undressed Winifred Bryan are grotesquely displayed in cacophonous tableaux of total disarray, enmeshed in furniture, props, and costumes, with . . . other junk strewn across their bodies in chaotically unstructured compositions” (1989:122). The connection between the two works by Rice and Smith is further underscored by the fact that The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man is additionally given a “typically beat inflection with the appearance of Jack Smith [himself] as an alternative interest for Mead” (James 1989:124). Like Rice, whose film work Smith lauded in the pages of Film Culture, Smith invested heavily in the beauty of junk. Joseph writes that Smith’s trash aesthetic is an endeavor to redeem and to elevate the outmoded and cast off from the 81

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state of abjection into which it has fallen, but that such material can only ever be retrieved as catastrophe and ruin (2008:244). Joseph illustrates the impossibility of recovering—or directly remaking—the cast-off objects of the recent past by referring to “The First Memoirs of Maria Montez,” a performance staged for Conrad’s tape recorder on February 24, 1963, and much later released as the second volume of Conrad’s Audio ArtKive, Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island (J. Smith 1997b). The partially improvised scenario—populated by Smith, Conrad, Mario Montez, and David Gurin—recounts Universal Studios’ exhumation of the body of Maria Montez ten years after her death so that she could be redeployed in a new cycle of epics produced by “Jack Smith, the raging movie director . . . of Flaming Creatures” and touted as “a gilded extravaganza” (J. Smith 1997b). A secret recipe— consisting of “plaster, shredded movie magazines and chicken fat”—is devised to cover over the movie-star corpse’s imperfections, but it doesn’t prevent chunks of her face from occasionally coming away and sinking to the bottom of the Pool of Midnight. As Joseph points out, the outrageous story—a version of which was published in Film Culture (J. Smith 1963–1964b)—outlines the “aesthetic coordinates” of Smith’s film work: that the outmoded glamor of Hollywood films of the 1940s can be recovered only “in a fragmentary, decaying state, marked by its age and dejected status” (2008:242). Writing on the “uses” of camp, Andrew Ross similarly comments on the “necrophilic trappings”—the “ ‘sick’ fascination” with the link between glamor and death—in the “cult of Hollywoodiana” (1989:137–38). The necrophiliac aspect of cultism—the resurrection of the studio system’s faded stars and faded films—is literalized not only in this marvelously sick scenario but also in Blonde Cobra, where Smith declares, “This corpse is obviously dead. . . . I’m ravishing the corpse, ravish, ravish, ravish, ravish, ravish, uuuuh necrophiliac 82

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longings, necrophiliac fulfilment” (J. Smith and Jacobs 1963:2), but also later in Flaming Creatures’ Vampire-Coffin Sequence. If the rubble-strewn construction sites of Scotch Tape stand in for the crumbling neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, then the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence of Flaming Creatures might also be understood as an allegorical representation of urban collapse, fragmentation, and ruin. But the Earthquake Sequence—insofar as it embraces an “aesthetic of the unbalanced, irregular, fragmentary, ruinous, and artificial” (Joseph 2008:245)—also resists the conventions of the “well-made,” the upright and secant, commercial film product. This resistance in turn underlines the fabricated nature of all cultural artifacts and existing social order: “Smith’s aesthetic points up the evidently constructed . . . state of all cultural production. . . . Outmoded objects of the recent past reveal to us the constructedness of the present moment” (Joseph 2008:244). Announced by a close-up of the swaying lantern, the earthquake not only disrupts the ravishment-orgy but also renders it “a disordered mass of interlocking limbs, faces, genitals, hands, Bick’s one exposed breast, and other parts of the creatures’ bodies” (Joseph 2008:255). At certain points, the close framing and violently shaking camera admit little more than a blurring of light and dark. Nonetheless, as Ken Kelman writes, there are a “real violence and sadism [to] the scene” (1963:4), and this power to unsettle is no doubt in part attributable to the “Coney Island horror house” audio track (Packman 1977:54), assembled from screams provided by Smith, Montez, Rockwood, and Kate and Piero Heliczer and available (in abridged form) on the first volume of Conrad’s Audio ArtKive, Les Evening Gowns Damnées (J. Smith 1997a). Joseph, who provides the fullest account of Conrad’s invaluable contribution to Smith’s film works, explains how the effect was 83

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achieved: “By downshifting the tape speed halfway through, Conrad lowered the pitch, simultaneously augmenting and distancing the ominousness of the sound. In the end, the flaming creatures, spent by their profligate expenditure of energy, are shown exhausted and dead on the plaster-strewn floor” (2008:255). The Orgy-Earthquake Sequence might readily be criticized for its (conventional) aestheticization of violence against women or its emphasis on the breast as evidence of its infantile narcissism, but its bringing together of sexuality and violence can also be seen as part of its radical queer politics and cult reputation. As Moon argues, “The real erotic power of Smith’s ‘comedies[,]’ . . . the primary source of their [transgressive] power,” resides in their performativity: in the fact that “the erotic charges in a work like Flaming Creatures do not follow hard-wired gender lines, but move powerfully across circuits of gender and sexual identity in not altogether predictable fashions” (1995:293–94; see also Doty 2000:7). This performativity is amplified by Smith’s rough yet delicate and complicated aesthetic framings. As Carel Rowe describes these framings, the creatures are “shot so as to appear almost invisible throughout the film, we see more veils than faces, more truncated bodies than characters. . . . Their insubstantiality emphasizes their mutability, their transience” (1982:47). Further, the transgressions are worked through at another level—that of form and narrative—insofar as the “acinematic” visual field of the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence “overcomes its subordination to plot . . . by engaging excessive motion, eroticism, or violence[,] . . . by overstimulated camera movements[,] . . . [as well as by] overexposure, overcrowding the frame, and dirty lenses” (Joseph 2008:260). Perhaps anticipating the minimalism of Conrad’s best-known structural work, The Flicker (1966), a film that consists entirely of an alternating series of black-and-white frames, Smith 84

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wrote that “the primitive allure of movies is a thing of light and shadows”: A bad film is one which doesn’t flicker and shift and move through lights and shadows, contrasts, textures by way of light. If I have these I don’t mind phoniness (or the sincerity of clever actors), simple minded plots (or novelistic “good” plots), nonsense or seriousness. . . . Images evoke feelings and ideas that are suggested by feeling. . . . Images always give rise to a complex of feelings, thots [sic], conjectures, speculations, etc. (1962–1963:31–32)

INTERLUDE As the earthquake fades, Delores staggers to her feet, one breast still exposed, an arm thrown dramatically across her

Figure 3.10: Interlude, Flaming Creatures. 85

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head. As she is about to fall, the Fascinating Woman (Judith Malina)—a blonde dressed all in white (to mirror Francine), with a white lily clenched between her teeth—dashes into frame, catches Delores up in her arms, and rapidly pulls her out to the left of frame. Intimate close-ups of the two women follow, their warm embrace and stolen kisses accompanied by tumbling petals and the sounds of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Solo Violin. A quiet interlude follows in which the camera dwells on the scene: a long veil hangs in the breeze in front of the blossom, flower petals lay strewn at the foot of the vase, a fly crawls on the white cloth backdrop. The quiet interlude boasts some of the most striking images in Flaming Creatures. The swoon, in which Delores staggers backward, frames her dark figure in the left half of an otherwise empty white set and confirms Smith’s unerring sense of composition and intuition for camera placement. The midshots and close-ups of Delores and the Fascinating Woman are artfully—delicately—composed and, like some earlier shots in the film, recall the tight arrangements of Smith’s best black-and-white photography. One silvery close-up of the Fascinating Woman, pressed in the bottomleft corner of the frame, rotates ninety degrees to the right of her image before flaring into sheer luminosity. The shots—the inspired assemblage of bodies and tapestries—affirm Zazeela’s comment (made with reference to Smith’s still photography) that Smith was “like an alchemist,” someone capable of transmuting “ordinary mortals into gods and goddesses, into Superstars, into Flaming Creatures of the night” (1997:119). The women, reclined (as in so many of Smith’s still photographs), are showered in petals, and at the moment the violin music stops, there is a cut to shots of the blossom vase, a veil before it swaying gently in the breeze. Some shots—close-ups of the veil and the white drop sheet that marks out the set—are minimal, white on white, but for the blemishes and 86

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emulsion bubbles of the faded film stock that register like the minimalist ripples in Joyce Wieland’s short film Dripping Water (1969). Perhaps the best and most poetic description of the interlude comes from elsewhere in Smith’s work, the contemporaneous essay “The Memoirs of Maria Montez,” where he describes the ruined set of a movie studio: “The décor hangs down in tendrils and dust settles over all. There are strangled bodies hanging in the tendrils. . . . They sway and moulder flaking, flaking. . . . The set disappears in shadows, disappears in scaffolding” (1963–1964b:3).

VAMPIRE SEQUENCE The silence of the interlude is broken by a burst of music— the beginning of Kitty Kallen’s version of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” from 1961—and a short (sixsecond) shot of the lid levitating off a rough wooden coffin. A

Figure 3.11: Vampire Sequence, Flaming Creatures. 87

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cut goes back to a few more moments of the fly making its way across the painted sprigs of blossom before returning to the song, the coffin, and long-nailed, thin fingers pushing aside the lid to reveal its occupant: a blond-wigged vampire, Our Lady of the Docks (Joel Markman). Curls of her blond wig hanging low over her eyes, Our Lady emerges from the casket, clutching a long-stemmed lily in each hand. She gesticulates against the backdrop of the blossom vase and pointedly steps and dances around the expired creatures (in some shots she is barefoot, in others in heels). The song continues, accompanied by the distant sound of bells tolling, as the camera pans from a close shot of Francine’s bare feet across the fallen lantern to reveal the ravenous vampire crouched and feeding greedily from an inanimate creature’s neck. Sated, Our Lady lifts and throws her head back in feigned ecstasy. As the song comes to an end, the bells peal, and the she-vampire— shot from above and half out of frame—now quenched and flat on her back, is seen with gown hitched up above her waist and panty hose down around her knees, fondling her wormy penis. In “Flaming Closets,” Moon writes that the acting out of fantasies and imaginary identities in Smith’s films (and performances) needs to be considered in relation to the figure of the vamp and the practice of vamping (1995:292). As he points out, the term vamp is derived from the term vampire, denoting a mythic figure that circulated widely in the twentieth century, especially in the wake of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) and its popularization in the Universal Studios film Dracula (Browning, 1931) and its sequels—such as Dracula’s Daughter (Hillyer, 1936) and Son of Dracula (Siodmak, 1943). The “vamp-ire” in Flaming Creatures, according to Smith’s journal notes (1962:56), is modeled on the actress Veronica Lake (another fallen star), who especially in her noir roles of the 1940s played the femme fatale, an exotic woman 88

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who preyed upon and ruined the lives of (morally weak) men. The cut of Markman’s wig and the fact that the film was shot around the time of Marilyn Monroe’s death (in August 1962) led some commentators to describe Our Lady as a “transvestite Marilyn Monroe” (Sitney 1979:365). Markman, for his part, underlines not only the collision of sex and death but also resurrection, describing his role as one guided by “the passion and resurrection of the vampire Christ disguised behind the skirts of a transvestite queen” (1964:21). Although the performances and sexual appetites of the flaming creatures—like those of the “vamp-ire”—might be perceived (by some) as “secret, forbidden, and even monstrous,” Moon argues that Flaming Creatures and Smith’s other films “are indictments to his audience not only to play fast and loose with gender roles but also to push harder against prevailing constraints on sexuality” (1995:293). In Flaming Creatures’ Vampire-Coffin Sequence, the “vampire” figure is key to restimulating the expired souls of the orgy-earthquake, but the creature of the night also features elsewhere in Smith’s work. In Blonde Cobra, the vampire is evoked in the tombstones and tolling bells of the cemetery sequence, and Smith’s line—“To be dead, to be truly dead, is a wonderful blessing, oh Renfield my friend”—paraphrases Stoker’s Dracula. In The Death of P’Town (1961), his final collaboration with Jacobs, Smith plays the Fairy Vampire, and his article “Maria Montez Voice Competition” (a competition held to find a voice double of Maria Montez for the soundtrack of Normal Love) describes the Wonderful One’s voice as a composite of French, Spanish, Greta Garbo, and Dracula: “in fact the same accent and rhythm of Bela Lugosi, filled with implications of Transylvania” (Smith 1963:n.p.). More directly, the vampire figures in Smith’s performance in his epic and unfinished collaboration with Warhol, Batman Dracula (1964). In his interview with Gerard Malanga, Smith claimed Dracula 89

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as his favorite role and described how he got into the part, slowly transforming himself and letting his soul pass out through his eyes into the mirror and back into him as Dracula (Malanga 1967:13). In popular mythology, the vampire has no reflection, but the mirror features not only in Smith’s characterization of his performance for Warhol’s film but also in “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness,” where he describes film and the mirror as a place of transcendence: “(Before a mirror is a place) is a place where it is possible to clown, to pose, to act out fantasies, to not be seen while one gives[.] (Movie sets are sheltered, exclusive places where nobody who doesn’t belong can go)” (1962–1963:30, parentheses and repetition in the original). Finally, Smith’s interest in the Prince of Darkness is entirely consistent with the contemporaneous pantheon of fantasy and horror figures played by the Superstars of Cinemaroc and assembled for the filming of Normal Love: the Mermaid (Montez), the Green Mummy (Angus MacLise), Cobra Woman (Beverly Grant), Black Spider (Naomi Levine), Pink Fairy (Francine), the Mummy (Conrad), Cobra Lady (Bick), Werewolf (Eliot Cuker), White Bat (John Vacarro), and others.

“SIBONEY” SEQUENCE Two close-ups—one of Our Lady, the other of a reanimated creature—follow, and as the first strains of “Siboney” replace the bells, Our Lady—head tilted back, mouth open, eyes to camera—and Francine are captured in two long, thirty- and twenty-second close shots from above, in each other’s arms and moving in a circling dance. Foggy at its outset, an extended, eighteen-second long shot follows, clearing to reveal Our Lady dancing with a second creature (who wears Francine’s white, embroidered costume) at the very bottom of the frame against the blossom backdrop. An overhead closeup of the couple, Our Lady and Francine, is accompanied by 90

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Figure 3.12: “Siboney” Sequence, Flaming Creatures.

the first lyrics of an unknown vocal version of the song “Siboney,” written by Ernesto Lecuona (1929). There follows a cut to a thirty-second long shot of the blossom backdrop, now populated with hitherto unseen creatures: one (a sailor) at left, another (Piero Heliczer in blackface) dancing on the spot at the right, and a third, at the very edge of frame, initially obscured and mainly visible because of her fluttering black fan. The shot is held as Our Lady and her dance partner twirl in from the left of frame.

SPANISH GIRL SEQUENCE There follows a close-up shot of Delores and the creature with prosthetic nose dancing, another creature (Conrad) in a torn dress and backside partially exposed visible behind them. This shot cuts abruptly to the sounds of the fanfare from the carnival sequence at the opening of von Sternberg’s The Devil Is 91

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a Woman and a midshot of the Spanish Girl (Delores Flores, a.k.a. Mario Montez), stunningly dressed in black gown with black lace mantilla, rose clenched in her teeth, moving out from behind a curtain to dance center frame. As she twirls, another shot picks up Our Lady sniffing lilies held aloft, while Francine (or someone in his costume) kneels in front her, sniffing at her crotch. Extreme close-ups of hairy armpits follow, and a second (looped) burst of music highlights the Spanish Girl in medium shot dancing right to left and back, as others behind her look on. These other creatures, including the buxom young woman wearing Francine’s costume, join in as the movement—both of the camera and the dancers— becomes increasingly exuberant. From this point, there is a return in this scene to the protracted methods of the opening credit sequence, wherein the endless dancing displaces formal and narrative structures with the sensual. The fragmented

Figure 3.13: Spanish Girl Sequence, Flaming Creatures.

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and tight framings as well as the movements of the camera and of the creatures passing in front of it exaggerate this displacement. Overhead shots reveal the circling dancers, and then a midshot of Our Lady, now dancing with a bespectacled creature (also in Francine’s costume), is accompanied by the return of “Siboney,” mixed with the carnival music. The music and lyrics of “Siboney” are heard again with clarity against a medium close-up of the dancing Spanish Girl. From here, the camera cuts back to an overhead shot and on to dancing— white on white—until shots (obscured by costumes and a hanging veil) blur into a foggy indiscernibility. This is contrasted with extreme close-ups of the twirling Spanish Girl until around five minutes before the end the movement is interrupted with a static tableau: Marian Zazeela in her cameo role (as Maria Zazeela), posed topless, one arm cast above her head and thrown across her brow. She is surrounded by reclining men (La Monte Young, Angus MacLise, Irving Rosenthal) in burnooses, and one of them (Young) has his finger pressed against her left nipple. The reanimation of the lifeless creatures is a further reminder that secret-flix cannot be remade but only exhumed (Hoberman 1997b:17), and the vampire’s kiss now leads into the film’s extended production number. The segment is a reminder, too, of Smith’s investment in Hollywood exotica and of Timothy Corrigan’s evaluation that “cult movies are always after a fashion foreign films: the images are especially exotic; the viewer uniquely touristic” (1991:27). The eruption into motion and endless dancing is a return to the excess— the “out-of-control, contagious energy” (Joseph 2008:353)— of the Orgy-Earthquake Sequence. In the period 1959–1963, Smith shot a film with Bob Fleischner and Jerry Sims titled Overstimulated, and this condition is literalized in the final panel of Flaming Creatures, wherein “[the creatures] do not come

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back to life [simply] to exist in frozen, piled-up, allegorical tableaux” but return in “Dionysian embraces and polymorphous sexual encounters, manifesting a desire that seems always on the verge of erupting into an excessive, overwhelming outpouring” (Joseph 2008:253). Although the episode begins sedately—with the gentle circlings of Our Lady and Francine (or, more correctly, the Francines) to the strains of “Siboney”— the energy level is cranked up with the appearance of the Spanish Girl and her accompanying music. Character gestures and camera movement conspire so that “twirling bodies careen from one side of the screen to the other or, shot from above, appear as madly spinning tops that, partially through sheer duration, nearly induce feelings of dizziness” (Joseph 2008:255). Particularly striking is a medium close-up shot of Mario Montez, the Spanish Girl, in which—at intervals—he twirls nine times for the camera before blurring into a continual spin. The episode is repeated within the minute, but the framing is tighter, and Montez’s movements are even more accelerated. Although credited in this film, his screen debut, as “Delores Flores” (a name Smith assigned to him), Montez assumed his subsequent stage name—in honor of his two idols, Maria Montez and Marilyn Monroe (Siegel 2014b:366)— ahead of his performances in Normal Love and Rice’s Chumlum (1964). Smith would later declare Montez his greatest superstar for the way he “immediately enlist[ed] the sympathy of the audience” (in Malanga 1967:14). For Joseph, the “Siboney” dance sequence, like the OrgyEarthquake Sequence before it, exemplifies Smith’s “raging, overstimulated vision” and more generally demonstrates that Smith’s project was to produce a countercinema or “cinema of excess” in which “the opposition is between a cinema of convention, restriction, generality, and reproduction [a cinema of sameness] and a cinema of idiosyncrasy, expansion and

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originality, and . . . affective force” (2008:255, emphasis in original)—that is, a cinema of radical difference. The counterpoint to the movement of the dance sequences is the excessive stillness of the tableau scene featuring Zazeela and her consorts. Cut into four, approximately ten-second long shots, the tableau first appears around five minutes before the end of the film and recurs at approximately one-minute intervals. The precarious arrangement of still figures—like the dancers’ careening movements—suggests a situation of immanent collapse, a falling down. This situation has already been witnessed in an earlier tableau shot in which one of the creatures slides—falls—to the floor, but it also relates to a recurring trope in Smith’s work—one that loops back to the delay of the film’s opening—namely, an acute sense of failure and collapse. Tartaglia writes that Smith’s work is characterized by an all-encompassing feeling of failure and despair: “ ‘What a horrible story!’ he [Smith] would exclaim during a performance. He did his best to make the audience see that the actors were inept, that the sets were amateurish and ugly, that the execution was a disaster, and that he himself was a failure in life and in art” (2001:51). Sitney traces this feeling back to Star Spangled to Death and Jacobs’s development of an “aesthetics of failure”: “I had a terrific bent toward a barren dynamic perfection . . . [but] then [I’d] introduce Jack and Jerry [Sims] to break up its pattern or to create some new possibilities. . . . I was interested in revealing things in their breaking and I wanted Star Spangled to Death to be a film that was constantly breaking” (quoted in Sitney 1979:334– 35). Moon similarly refers to the Jacobs–Smith collaborations, writing that “the Lonely Little Boy” episode in Blonde Cobra not only “organizes itself along the manic lines of wild activity eventuating in failure (i.e., falling)” but also repeats a

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sequence from the earliest of Jacobs–Smith collaborations, Little Cobra Dance (1957), in which Smith, dressed as an exotic Spanish lady, launches into a wild dance and falls down (1995:294, 297). Judith Halberstam’s account of the “(queer) art of failure” provides an understanding of Smith’s (and Jacobs’s) critique of static models of success and failure. Tactics such as “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing” provide a means of escaping “the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development . . . [and that deliver] us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (2011:3). Invoking phrases similar to Jacobs’s “little boy revolution,” Halberstam continues: “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers” (3). Flaming Creatures’ “failure” to realize a conventional narrative becomes an opportunity to invest in something more real—creative and spontaneous. For every norm or custom, failure becomes a way to uncover an incongruity or alternative. And although this failure might be accompanied by some of the real negative effects experienced by Smith throughout his lifetime— frustration, despair, and near abject poverty—failure is also an act of resistance, “an opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. . . . Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant” (Halberstam 2011:3, 6). In contrast to the loathsome “careerism,” exemplified by the great success story of Warhol, Smith’s fabulous failure—his (surrealist) investment in “the unplanned, the unexpected, the improvised, and the surprising”— becomes “a refusal of mastery, [and] a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit” (Halberstam 2011:16, 11–12). 96

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END SEQUENCE As the film nears its conclusion, a cut from the tableau shot of Zazeela back to the dance shows the creatures, shot from above and lying on the ground in star formation, providing a central space into which the Spanish Girl leaps to continue her dance. At the third return to the tableau shot, the strains of “Siboney” and the complex mix of other sampled sounds and vocals lifted from von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman fade to near silence. There follow tightly framed, silent shots of veils and creatures, including one in which the Spanish Girl gently kisses Our Lady, who is smoking a cigarette, on the cheek. These shots, which occupy around two minutes of silence, are abruptly punctuated by the incongruous sound of the Everly Brothers’ version of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (1958). The

Figure 3.14: End sequence, Flaming Creatures. 97

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camera tilts down from a pair of shapely legs that daggle in half-rolled stockings and pumps to the hanging lantern, which begins to sway as the camera shakes violently. Indistinct shots and images follow, including one with a hand-written card— “The End”—seen through the crook of an arm, and, finally, as the song ends, a shot of a jiggling breast. The intricately lettered card of Flaming Creatures’ near-tofinal shot reads “The End,” but it is unlikely Smith ever really intended to finish—close—this film or any film. Like Smith’s other film and performance works, Flaming Creatures is an assemblage that—in the manner of a surrealist ethnography— has the order of an unfinished collage rather than of a unified set. In Flaming Creatures’ secret remaking of a faded Hollywood, figures (images, sounds, gestures) do not return in order to close out a circuit of representation but rather return as the failures of representation—as fragmentation, multiplicity, and ruin—to “produce a transient effect of reference rather than [to point] to a specific, readable reference [source]” (Reynolds 2014:202). Gilles Deleuze explains that we should never confuse wholes with parts or sets: “Sets are closed, and everything which is closed is artificially closed. . . . But a whole is not closed, it is open, and it has no parts” (1986:10). In the end, Flaming Creatures is a total work that was conceived—visually, musically, structurally, accidentally, and emphatically—not as a closed set of images–sounds (to be repeated) but rather as an open whole that can be endlessly remade and remodeled.

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4 AFTERMATH AND LEGACY

The wide-ranging effects of Smith’s writings, photography, film, and theater work, if not the works themselves, now seem ubiquitous, but the cult status of Flaming Creatures— certainly in the period immediately following its banning in the state of New York—rested on the paradox that the film was inaccessible, virtually impossible to see, but that the discourse surrounding it was everywhere (Suárez 1996:183). The scandal made Smith something of a culture hero, but Smith, feeling wronged and exploited by the censorship debate that raged across the spring of 1964 (and beyond), gathered up his Superstars and retreated to the countryside to begin work on an ambitious color “sequel,” Normal Love. Smith recalled: “After the sickeningly pasty perception in New York City of Flaming Creatures I was not likely to make another movie that the people of my own city couldn’t see (not much gratification in that) so I spent my summer out in the country shooting a lovely, pasty, pink and green color movie that is going to be the definitive pasty expansion” ([1964] 1992:23). Featuring some of the rarest (until recently, little seen) and most beautiful images ever created by Smith, the unfinished film Normal Love, also known as The Great 99

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Pasty Triumph (1963–1964), has been described as a “documentary of people’s real reality: not the realities they had to be subjected to in the hideousness of the world around them” (Conrad in Jordan 2007). A homage to Maria Montez that “went haywire” (Conrad in Jordan 2007), Normal Love again assembles Smith’s stable of Superstars, expanded now to include the “new vamp” of underground movies, Beverly Grant. Affirming Ricard’s observation that “[Smith] was a repository of a vast amount of film lore” (1997:68), Normal Love draws upon a selection of Smith’s secret-flix of the 1940s—including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943), I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), and The Spider Woman (Neill, 1943) (Hoberman 1997c:45)—to stage a series of erotic encounters between (androgynous) stock movie characters: the Girl (Diana Baccus) and Uncle Pasty (Arnold Rockwood), the Mermaid (Mario Montez) and Werewolf (Eliot Cuker), the Cobra Woman (Grant), the Mummy (Tony Conrad), the Green Mummy (Angus MacLise), and others. Like Flaming Creatures, the film ends with a Busby Berkeley–type production number: a line-up of half-dressed “Chorus Cuties” (including an uncredited and barely visible Andy Warhol) dancing atop a gigantic, three-tiered, Claes Oldenburg–designed cake to a swelling musical score (credited to Conrad, MacLise, and Robert Adler). Never intending to complete Normal Love, Smith screened episodes from it as rushes while the film was in production, “orchestrating the eager anticipation of each fragment as if it were a movie serial: each scene was enhanced by the anticipation of marvels to come” (Sitney 1997:69, 115). In the summer of 1963, Warhol was shooting some footage for his early minimalist film Sleep—a complex montage of shots of poet John Giorno sleeping—at the summer farmhouse property of gallerist Eleanor Ward in Old Lyme, Connecticut. On the weekend of August 11, Smith and his 100

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Superstars arrived to realize on film the famous Cake Sequence—sketched on a page of Smith’s journal (1962:92)— in a meadow on Ward’s property (Angell 2014:161). Not only did Warhol appear briefly in the sequence, but he and Smith would go on to collaborate on several projects, the earliest of which was probably Wynn Gerry Claes, a home movie shot in the fall of 1963 in California, which shows Smith with Wynn Chamberlain, Gerard Malanga, and Claes and Patty Oldenburg (Angell 2006:186). Asked in an interview in 1965 whom he most admired in the New American Cinema, Warhol answered, in imitation of Smith’s penchant for exaggeration and delay: “Jaaaaacck Smiiiitttth.” Further prompted, Warhol explained: “When I was little I always . . . thought [Jack Smith] was my best director . . . I mean, just the only person I would ever copy, and just . . . so terrific and now since I’ve grown up, I just think that he makes the best movies. . . . He’s the only one I know who uses color . . . backwards” (in Goldsmith 2004:67, ellipsis in original). In POPism: The Warhol ’60s, Warhol is more specific about Smith’s influence, describing the weekends in Old Lyme: Jack Smith was filming a lot out there, and I picked something up from him for my own movies—the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored. . . . He would spend years shooting a movie and then he’d edit it for years. The preparations for every shooting were like a party. . . . One weekend he had everyone making a birthday cake the size of a room as a prop for his movie, Normal Love. (Warhol and Hackett 1980:31–32) Smith was a powerful influence on Warhol. The early Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort Of . . . (1963)—the movie with Taylor 101

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Mead as Tarzan and Naomi Levine as Jane that Warhol (partially) shot around the bathtub of his Beverly Hills hotel room during a star-struck visit to Los Angeles—was like a Ron Rice– Jack Smith improvised film. Warhol and Smith collaborated on the unfinished Batman Dracula in 1964, and Smith appeared in other Warhol movies, including Camp (1965), in which he had a central role, and Hedy (1966), in which he had the small but important part of the Soothsayer. Smith is also seen— “underexposed and subdued”—in Warhol’s Screen Test (no. ST315, 1964), where “[he] engages the camera with a series of meaningful eye movements. At one point he gives a slight, devilish smile, then stares intently into the lens, his expression subtly shifting between thoughtfulness and anxiety” (Angell 2006:186). Warhol appropriated the term superstar from Smith’s Cinemaroc studio and employed several of Smith’s creatures: notably, Mario Montez in Mario Banana (1964), More Milk Yvette (1965), The Chelsea Girls (1966), and other films; Arnold Rockwood in Hedy; Francis Francine in Lonesome Cowboys (1967–1968); and even Smith’s muse, Marian Zazeela, in Screen Tests (1964). Sitney summarily observes: “Warhol shared Smith’s fascination with Hollywood and parodied its star system; he distilled and formalized the dense black and white texture of Smith’s cinematography, and he, like Smith, encouraged his followers to give themselves ironic pseudonyms” (1997:69). Most significantly, in his bestknown “minimalist” films—Sleep, Haircut (1963–1964), Eat (1963–1964), Kiss (1963–1964), and Empire (1964)—“Warhol radicalized and mechanized Smith’s aggressive use of time” (Sitney 1997:69, emphasis added). In the aftermath of the Flaming Creatures’ controversy, Smith was a hot property, but Sitney nonetheless observes that “Jack Smith and his ‘creatures’ [were] breaking up just as [another New York group], Andy Warhol and his associates,

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was expanding” (1997:69). Despite Warhol and Smith’s collaborations, the two were almost polar opposites in disposition: “Unlike Warhol, who had a genius for attracting and holding on to collaborators and powerful supporters, Smith . . . was a Blakean agonist in his personal relations, thriving on enmity, with the power to mythologize his antagonisms, his obsessions, and his fantasies” (Sitney 1997:69). Ricard similarly reflects upon the moment: “It’s strange to look back now and remember how in the early 1960s film aesthetics seemed so neatly split between Warhol and Jack Smith. The apparent antithesis made an entire and rich culture. Where Andy was slick and shiny, Jack was, in his own words, ‘moldy and pasty.’ . . . At one point they were equally famous. But Jack didn’t see Andy as a complement. Jack had to make Andy a vampire. And whose blood? That’s right—always Jack’s” (1997:68). After their falling out, Smith referred to Warhol as “Andy Panda” because he thought Warhol pandered to the art market. A “careerist” world was one for which Smith had the utmost contempt, and, to him, Warhol was just another Vampire of the Cocktail World: “Critically you can’t deal with Warhol any more than you can deal with the plaster. . . . What Warhol uses is icing instead of plaster . . . and the sparkle on top of the icing is amphetamine. There’s nothing underneath. . . . He’s the product of unarrested commercial intrusion into our daily lives” (quoted in Leffingwell 1997:77). In his subsequent film and performance work, Smith was resolute in his determination to resist the mercenary aspect of a system that in his estimation worked overtime to depoliticize and transform everything into profit. The great cross-over success of The Chelsea Girls (1966)—Warhol’s three-and-one-quarter-hour epic document of the underground, made up of twelve 33-minute unedited and unrelated color and black-and-white reels projected in

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pairs—brought Warhol more money and fame, whereas for Smith Flaming Creatures had attracted only scandal, litigation, and despair. Smith told Lotringer: “My life has been made a nightmare because of that damn film. [It] sucked up ten years of my life” (in Lotringer 1978:195). Smith’s reaction was to turn increasingly to provisional, open-ended works, among the first of which was Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis, presented at the New Cinema Festival (a.k.a. Expanded Cinema Festival) at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in November–December 1965. The festival included works by many of Smith’s community—Jacobs, Heliczer, MacLise, Vacarro—and concluded with a La Monte Young piece, Theater of Eternal Music, featuring John Cale, Conrad, and Zazeela. Smith’s performance—a published version of which appeared in Film Culture (J. Smith 1966)—featured Smith regulars (Montez, Vacarro, Markman), and Mekas described it in his “Movie Journal” column for November 18, 1965: The Jack Smith and the John Vacarro [performances] had little to do with cinema. Both pieces were exercises in the Artaud theatre. Cinema was used only as an auxiliary of the theatre. . . . The Jack Smith piece, Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis . . . was an orgy of costumes, suppressed and open violence, and color. The center of the piece was a huge red lobster. . . . [The] piece was loose and relied on chance, on coincidences, on conglomerations. . . . Although the Jack Smith and the Vacarro pieces were presented as part of the New Cinema Festival, they may be—historically speaking—the first successful fusion of the Artaud theories, the happenings and environment experiences, and the traditional theatre (through the spoken word) into a new kind of theatre. (1972:212; see also Foreman 1992:138–39)

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Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis signaled a shift of emphasis in Smith’s work toward the privileging of process over product. As Edward Leffingwell, paraphrasing Richard Foreman (who was probably the first to make the observation), puts it, “[The] performance came together in such a way that the temporal activity of its creation and its witnessing, rather than the performance as a crafted result, became the objective” (1997:77). Resisting the institutionalized spaces of galleries and theaters, Smith declared his loft the “Plaster Foundation” in 1968 and endlessly reedited and rearranged sequences from Normal Love and his subsequent film-inprogress No President (1967–1970) as part of his live performances (Leffingwell 1997:78). Suárez explains Smith’s strategy, writing that the emphasis was always on contingency and provisionality: Fragmentation, heterogeneity, the recycling of aesthetically disreputable materials . . . and dedication to performance art appear as strategies to avoid commercialization [and institutionalization]. . . . Instability was most evident . . . in the mixture of rehearsal and actual performance. . . . Performances unfolded in an atmosphere of permanent crisis . . . [so that] his performances became more and more about the impossibility to stage or say anything, to the point of dramatizing their own failure, their own coming undone. (1996: 208–9) An understanding of the ways in which Smith’s interrogation of artificial codes and ideological identities—already evident in Flaming Creatures—was amplified in and through his dedicated and often solo performances is evident in Mekas’s whimsical recollection of a late-night excursion to Smith’s

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loft. In his “Movie Journal” column for July 23, 1970, Mekas wrote: I suddenly was very conscious that it was 2 a.m. in New York, and very late, and . . . all the theaters had been closed and over, long ago . . . and that only here, in the downtown loft . . . was this huge junk set and these end-of-civilization activities, these happenings, this theatre. I began getting a feeling, it resembled more and more . . . the burial rites of capitalist civilization. . . . At 2 a.m., only Jack Smith was still alive, a madman, the high priest of the ironical burial grounds, administering last services here alone and by himself, . . . the keeper of the graveyard of the end of civilization, and one of the last and uncompromising great artists of our generation. (1972:393–97) Such hagiography contributed to the understanding of Smith as “romantic cult auteur”: “a lone heroic figure battling against the odds to create works [with minoritarian themes] that are taken to heart by outsider audiences” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011:68). Despite his evolution toward works increasingly conceived of as open-ended and provisional constructs, Smith’s influence—due largely to the reputation of Flaming Creatures but also to his “on the edge” sensibility—registered in the emergent New York Downtown art scene and in the No Wave film movement of 1974–1984, typified by works such as Amos Poe’s films Blank Generation (1975) and Unmade Beds (1976). In the 1970s, with the city of New York on the verge of bankruptcy, the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan was riddled with burned-out and derelict buildings, populated mainly by rats and cockroaches. Members of the new generation of musicians and filmmakers—the so-called no wave— who took up residence there were drawn to the vicinity not 106

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only for its low-rent apartments but also for its history of runand-shoot, low-budget filmmaking. Like Smith, for whom the Lower East Side immigrant populations of the 1950s appeared like some kind of “exotic” impoverished version of glamorous Hollywood studios, the No Wave filmmakers of the 1970s made the abandoned streets and derelict apartments their movie studio. Speaking in Celine Daniher’s documentary film Blank City (2010), the artist-filmmaker James Nares, whose super-8 movie Rome 78 (1978) was a key work, said: “We were very aware that it was the same neighborhood where old one-reelers and tworeelers had been made at the turn of the century, where they shot a movie in an afternoon. We felt like there was a history behind us of quick, hopefully hard-hitting movie making.” Appealing to the more recent influences of the time, Jim Jarmusch—whose contribution to the scene included not only Permanent Vacation (1980) but also music with No Wave band the Del-Byzanteens—affirmed that there was an immediate “precedent for underground filmmaking in New York: like Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank and Jack Smith, for sure” (in Daniher 2010). Nares recalls Smith as a formidable presence—a larger-than-life figure—in the neighborhood: “I remember him pointing to rats on the street [and dramatically] saying, ‘There! The souls of dead landlords’ ” (in Daniher 2010). Smith’s investment in a genre of performance was his response to “landlordism” and more generally his rejection of an art world that might limit and constrain his work by framing it within its critical and institutional frameworks. This uncompromising vision (along with his volatile personality) meant that Smith’s later works—such as Normal Love, which became “one of the great rumors of art history” (Ricard 1997:115)—were conceived as provisional constructs subject to constant reformulation. Indeed, Suárez suggests that 107

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Smith’s disagreement with Mekas over Flaming Creatures in the late 1970s may have been due to two radically different conceptions of the text: “Mekas understood the movie as a definite whole with an unchangeable form[,] [a definitive version]; but Smith saw it as an image reservoir to be reshuffled ad infinitum[,] [a potentiality]” (1996:199). Concerned that Smith wanted access to the master copy of Flaming Creatures, held at Anthology Film Archives, so that he could cut it up and reassemble it, Mekas refused to cooperate, claiming: “Smith was at the time too unstable and might damage the film irreparably” (quoted in Suárez 1996:199). Despite this instability, Smith’s associates and former collaborators nevertheless continued to recognize him as a unique and powerful influence. Conrad declared, “Jack Smith was his own country”—“he spoke differently; he looked at different things; he liked different things. . . . Everything he did was part of a self-constructed universe.” Conrad also acknowledged that his own work with Beverly Grant, Coming Attractions (1970), was “a weird revisiting of the Jack Smith experiences” (2006:60, 76). More typically, the legacy of Smith’s film, photography, and performance work (beyond Warhol) has been noted in the film work of George Kuchar, Scott and Beth B, and John Waters; in the visual art of Nan Goldin, Hélio Oiticica, and Cindy Sherman; and in the avant-garde theater and performance works of Robert Wilson, John Vacarro, and Robert Foreman (Leffingwell 1997:70; Tartaglia 2001:42). Although still a presence on the Lower East Side—where he had shuffled between lofts on Greene Street, Mercer Street, Grand Street, and finally First Avenue—Smith had drifted into relative obscurity by the 1980s (Johnson 2012:9). In the period immediately following his death on September 16, 1989, Smith’s “life work” was preserved by performance artist Penny Arcade (a.k.a. Susana Ventura) with the assistance of film critic Jim Hoberman and subsequently 108

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incorporated as the Plaster Foundation in collaboration with New York’s P.S. 1 Museum. This incorporation led in 1997 to P.S. 1’s staging of the first major Jack Smith retrospective exhibition, Flaming Creature: The Art and Times of Jack Smith, and the accompanying publications Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times (Leffingwell, Kismaric, and Heiferman 1997) and Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (J. Smith 1997d). The P.S. 1 exhibition was accompanied by such forums as “Jack by Popular Demand,” reminiscences on Smith’s life and work by friends and colleagues in the pages of Artforum (1997), and a program of Smith’s films and other secret-flix curated by Hoberman for the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York from November 29 to December 14, 1997. In 2002, filmmaker Mary Jordan sought permission from the Plaster Foundation to access the Jack Smith Archive for a documentary work, provisionally entitled You Don’t Know Jack and subsequently released as Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2007). In the process, Jordan—in consultation with former Smith associate and editor of Big Table magazine Irving Rosenthal—inadvertently alerted Smith’s estranged younger sister, Mary Sue Slater, to the potential value of the archive and thus put ownership of the estate into dispute. Litigation spilled out over the next few years, with a Surrogate Court judge ruling in 2004 that the Smith Archive belonged to his sister, whereby the estate was passed on to her and subsequently sold to New York’s Gladstone Gallery in 2008, which later set about restoring and digitizing Smith’s complete film works (Carr 2004; Gallagher 2007; Hoberman 2011). The change in ownership led to another series of events, including “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World,” a conference held at Berlin’s Arsenal Institut für Film and Videokunst (October 2009); the major exhibition Thanks for Explaining Me at the Gladstone Gallery (New York, 109

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May–June 2011); and film programs at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (November 2011) and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (A Feast for Open Eyes, September 2011), which included screenings of Flaming Creatures, Scotch Tape, Overstimulated (1959), Normal Love, The Yellow Sequence (1963–1965), No President, Song for Rent (1969), Jungle Island (1967), I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo (1967–1970s), and Respectable Creatures (1950–1966). In 2013, Boo-Hurray (New York), in collaboration with Mekas, presented ephemera (handbills, posters, artworks) in the exhibition Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (February 14 to March 10, 2013), which was followed by a large-format publication with the same title. In November 2015, Anthology Film Archives ran a further program, “Jack Smith Selects (from the Grave),” a collection of Smith’s favorite films as described in a letter written to filmmaker and writer Peter Gidal in 1971. The program included romantic adventures such as White Savage (Lubin, 1943), The Thief of Bagdad (Berger, Powell, and Whelan 1940), Cry of the Bewitched (Crevenna, 1957), the sumptuous period piece The Leopard (Visconti, 1963), and the tawdry exploitation documentary Mondo Cane (Cavara, Jacopetti, and Properi, 1962). At the very end of the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Ken Jacobs—one of Smith’s closet collaborators—affirms the thesis that structures Jordan’s document: “Jack became a performance. He created a persona that totally swallowed him. His own Flaming Creature” (in Jordan 2007). Despite the acuity with which this message is presented, Jordan’s film was criticized for defying Smith’s own studiously glacial pace, instead “assaulting the eye and ear with split-second images” and thus “reinforcing every evil that sketcher, architect, filmmaker, and essayist Jack Smith fought against all his life” (Tavel in Frick and Hein 2009:n.p.). Nayland Blake identifies a related and general problem: how 110

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to document Smith’s achievements and deal with his legacy without enacting a kind of violence upon it, how to provide an understanding of a life work that is deliberately unfinished and demanding while at the same time retaining that difficulty and its politically disruptive dimension (1997:170). Blake suggests that to understand the “true genius” of Smith’s work, one must take it as a whole, “not chop it into highlights and masterpieces” (183). Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis perhaps falters for never displaying an awareness of the problem of re-presenting Jack Smith, something that the “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!” conference was acutely aware of when it acknowledged “that to subject an artist like Smith . . . to the institutional colloquy of scholars, artists, and peers is to risk seeking a canonical recuperation that inverts the analysand’s own tropisms” (Velasco 2010:59). The strategy of “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!” was thus to work with Smith’s entire “uncareer” and cult sensibility—“his trash aesthetic; his obtuse, paratactic tableaux; his aggressive ineptness in matters of money and publicity” (Velasco 2010:59)—and to admit that they add up not to a unified entity but to an unfinished collage and a tribute to Smith’s glorious “überfailure.” Jerry Tartaglia, who has for decades devoted himself to the restoration of Smith’s film works, was present at “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!” for the showing of Smith’s “complete” restored oeuvre, including Flaming Creatures. More recently, Tartaglia has continued the task of restoration with the support of the Gladstone Gallery and with access to the entire Jack Smith Archive. Of the restoration project, Tartaglia wrote: Together these newly-restored films will bring a new understanding and appreciation of the work and life of Jack Smith. Judging by appearances, it would seem that he expected no great outcome from his work. He anticipated failure and sometimes even created the 111

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conditions that would invite it. Yet, through his sometimes paranoiac outbursts, he had an unflagging demand for perfection in his creative process, and a willingness to endure the kind of sacrifices in his life that most of us would never tolerate. (2013) The magnitude of Smith’s life work—for me, the great triumph of his überfailure—is not only sketched in this book but also memorialized in that private screening of a National Film and Video Lending Service 16mm print of Flaming Creatures set up for me in a Melbourne screening room some twenty years ago. In the time since then, much has changed, with the hitherto rarely seen Flaming Creatures having been restored and digitized by the Gladstone Gallery and sold in analogue and digital formats to selected museums and art institutions worldwide. This process has enabled recent retrospectives, such as (at the time of writing) a Jack Smith season at New York’s Metrograph cinema in September 2018 (on Smith’s own Ludlow Street) in which Flaming Creatures appeared alongside Scotch Tape and Overstimulated in a session titled “Explorations of an ‘Aesthetic of Delirium.’ ” All of this contributes to the movement of interest in Smith, from devout underground cult allegiance to wider mainstream attention. Neville Wakefield, curator of the Gladstone Gallery’s Thanks for Explaining Me retrospective and now keeper of the flame, provides a recent summation not only of those features— exoticism, rarity, transgression—that have contributed to Flaming Creatures’ enduring cult reputation but also, more generally, to the contours of Smith’s remarkable life work: More than almost any artist of the last century Jack Smith understood that within the prevailing cultures of success, art’s greatest role may have been to provide provision for public failure. To this end his actors and 112

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accomplices, props and lighting, drugs and desires were invariably wrong: wrong before the performance had started—before even the lights had gone down. The marathon of tourettic revisions, false starts and delays signaled to the world the impossibility of creating anything of value in a rectilinear lagoon where even the dedicated and willing were dragged to the bottomfeeding level of landlords and lobsters. Yet out of these impossible conditions was born the stuff of exquisite beauty, radical politics, lurid, caustic, pornographic and often hilarious evocations of the sexual and social strata in which we find ourselves. Much of this endures even in conditions Smith would have most likely have loathed. But the fact that the same frictions that heated and formed his work continue to frustrate curators as well as inflame and inspire artists . . . is, I hope, testament to the enduring power and influence of Jack Smith’s extraordinary art. (2011) The cult adulation of Flaming Creatures and Smith’s life work is perhaps long overdue, but Smith would no doubt have responded with suspicion. As he once said, “If I still have any friends it’s because they aren’t thru with me yet” (J. Smith 1997c:152).

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1

2

These public lecture/screenings were “Moldy Art: The Exotic World of Jack Smith,” Audiovisions series, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, June 27, 2001; “1963,” B Is for Bad Cinema series, Monash University, Clayton, September 18, 2008; and “The Great Moldy Triumph: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” Controversies on Film series, Melbourne Free University, February 23, 2012. See, for example, Jack Smith: Flaming Creature: His Amazing Life and Times (Leffingwell, Kismaric, and Heiferman 1997); “Jack by Popular Demand: Jack Smith in Retrospect” (Artforum 1997); Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc (Hoberman 2001); “Primitives and Flaming Creatures” in Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (A “Minor” History) (Joseph 2008); Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance, and Visual Culture (Johnson 2012); and “Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World” (Siegel 2014). Smith’s writings have been collected in Jack Smith: Historical Treasures (J. Smith 1990); Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (J. Smith 1997d); and Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: Artwork, Ephemera, and Photography by Jack Smith (J. Smith 2013).

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1. BACKGROUND AND PRODUCTION 1

All quotations from Smith’s journal (J. Smith 1962) are transcribed without corrections to spelling and grammar. The journal is a ledger with printed page numbers.

3. THE FILM WORK: FLAMING CREATURES 1

This analysis was undertaken with reference to a 16mm print of Flaming Creatures provided by the National Film and Video Lending Service (Australia). The film leader reads: © 1992 THE PLASTER FOUNDATION.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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———. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conover, Grandin. 1964. “Flaming Creatures: Rhapsodic Asexuality.” Village Voice, July 23, 9. Conrad, Tony. 2006. “On the Sixties.” In Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, 55–76. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cornell, Joseph. [1941–1942] 1991. “ ‘Enchanted Wanderer’: Excerpt from a Journey Album for Hedy Lamarr.” In The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Hammond, 222–24. Edinburgh: Polygon. Corrigan, Timothy. 1991. “Film and the Culture of Cult.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte, 26–37. Austin: University of Texas Press. Daniher, Celine, dir. 2010. Blank City (documentary). Kino Lorber. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doty, Alexander. 2000. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York: Routledge. Eberstadt, Isabel. 1997. “Talent, Without Question.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 71 and 115–16. Eco, Umberto. 1986. “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” In Travels in Hyperreality, translated by William Weaver, 197–211. London: Picador. Foreman, Richard. 1992. “During the Second Half of the Sixties.” In To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, edited by David James, 138–44. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frick, Annette, and Wilheim Hein, eds. 2009. [No special issue title.] Jenseits Der Trampelpfade 10 (October). Gallagher, David. 2007. “You Don’t Know Jack.” Filmmaker 15, no. 3 (Spring): 60–63, 94–96. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2004. I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Warhol Interviews 1962–1987. New York: Carroll & Graf. Grant, Barry K. 1991. “Science Fiction Double Feature: Ideology in the Cult Film.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte, 122–37. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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———. 2000. “Second Thoughts on Double Features: Revisiting the Cult Film.” In Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics, edited by Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper, 15–27. Guilford, U.K.: FAB Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hammond, Paul. 1991. “Available Light.” In The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 2nd ed., 1–48. Edinburgh: Polygon. Hanhardt, John G. 1995. “A Movement Toward the Real: Pull My Daisy and the American Independent Film, 1950–65.” In Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965, edited by Lisa Phillips, 215–33. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Paris: Flammarion. Harrington, Stephanie Gervis. 1964. “City Sleuths Douse Flaming Creatures.” Village Voice, March 12, 3 and 13. Heath, Stephen. 1981. “The Question Oshima.” In Questions of Cinema, 145–64. London: Macmillan. Hoberman, J. 1997a. “The Big Heat: Making and Unmaking Flaming Creatures.” In Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times, edited by Edward Leffingwell, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman, 152–67. London: Serpent’s Tail. ——. 1997b. “Jack Smith: Bagdada and Lobsterrealism.” Introduction to Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell, 14–23. London: Serpent’s Tail/High Risk. ——. 1997c. “Treasures of the Mummy’s Tomb: The Lost Films of Jack Smith.” Film Comment, November–December, 42–47. ——. 2001. On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc. New York: Granary Books. ——. 2011. “Jack in the Box.” Artforum 50, no. 1 (September): 95–97. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum. 1983. Midnight Movies. New York: Harper and Row. Indiana, Gary. 1997. “Insistent Director.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 67 and 115. Jacobs, Ken. 1997a. “Body Art.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 73 and 119. ——. 1997b. “The Great Blonde Cobra Collaboration.” In Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, edited by

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J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell, 162–63. London: Serpent’s Tail/High Risk. ——. 1998. “Thanks for Explaining Me: Jack Smith at PS.1.” Aperture 152 (Fall): 74–76. James, David E. 1989. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Dominic. 2012. Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance, and Visual Culture. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press. Jordan, Mary, dir. 2007. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (documentary). Tongue Press. Joseph, Branden W. 2008. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (A “Minor” History). New York: Zone Books. Kelman, Ken. 1963. “Smith Myth.” Film Culture 29 (Summer): 4–6. ——. 1964. “Anticipations of the Light.” The Nation, May 11, 490–94. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1980. “The Film-Work, 2.” Camera Obscura 5:7–68. Leffingwell, Edward. 1997. “The Only Normal Man in Baghdad.” In Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times, edited by Edward Leffingwell, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman, 68–87. London: Serpent’s Tail. Leffingwell, Edward, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman, eds. 1997. Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times. London: Serpent’s Tail. Lotringer, Sylvère. 1978. “Uncle Fishhook and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art: Interview with Jack Smith.” Semiotext(e) 3, no. 2: 192–203. MacDonald, Scott. 1998. “Ken and Flo Jacobs.” In A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, 363–96. Berkeley: University of California Press. Malanga, Gerard. 1967. “Interview with Jack Smith.” Film Culture 45 (Summer): 12–16. Markman, Joel L. 1964. “Some Thoughts About Jack Smith.” Film Culture 32 (Spring): 21–22. Markopoulos, Gregory. 1964. “Innocent Revels.” Film Culture 33 (Summer): 41–45. Martin, Adrian. 1993. “The Artificial Night.” In Surrealism: Revolution by Night, 190–95. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. Martin, Marie. 2015. “Le remake secret: Généalogie et perspectives d’une fiction théorique.” CiNéMAS 25, nos. 2–3: 13–32.

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Mathijs, Ernest, and Jamie Sexton. 2011. Cult Cinema: An Introduction. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. Mekas, Jonas. 1961. “The First Statement of the [New American Cinema] Group.” Film Culture 22–23 (Summer): 131. ——. 1962. “Notes on the New American Cinema.” Film Culture 24 (Spring): 6–16. ——. 1963a. “Absurd, Chance, Zen etc Poetry.” In Jack Smith, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: Artwork, Ephemera, and Photography by Jack Smith, edited by Johan Kugelberg, and John Zorn, 70. New York: Boo-Hooray. ——. 1963b. “Fifth Independent Film Award.” Film Culture 29 (Summer): 1. ——. 1964a. “Editorial.” Film Culture 32 (Spring): 1–2. ——. 1964b. “Movie Journal.” Village Voice, April 18, 13 and 16. ——. 1972. Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–1971. New York: Collier Books. Moon, Michael. 1995. “Flaming Closets.” In Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, edited by Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, 282–306. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. “After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity.” In Queer Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 169–83. New York: New York University Press. New York Times. 1964. “Avant-Garde Movie Seized as Obscene.” March 4. Packman, David. 1977. “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures: With the Tweak of an Eyebrow.” Film Culture 63–64:51–56. Perkins, Claire, and Constantine Verevis. 2014. “Introduction: B Is for Bad Cinema.” In B Is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, and Cultural Value, edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, 1–18. Albany: State University of New York Press. Perlson, Hili. 2009. “Jack Smith & Tony Conrad.” Artslant, February 9. https://www.artslant .com /ny /articles /show /11145 -jack -smith -tony -conrad. Pierson, Michele. 2011. “Introduction: Ken Jacobs—a Half-Century of Cinema.” In Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, 3–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pouncey, Edwin. 2001. “Inside the Dream Syndicate.” The Wire 206 (April): 42–49.

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Reisman, David. 1990–1991. “In the Grip of the Lobster: Jack Smith Remembered.” Millennium Film Journal 23–24:60–85. Reynolds, Ann. 2014. “A History of Failure.” Criticism 56, no. 2: 187–209. Ricard, René. 1997. “No Dice.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 68 and 115. Rinder, Lawrence. 1997. “Anywhere out of the World: The Photography of Jack Smith.” In Flaming Creature: Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times, edited by Edward Leffingwell, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman, 139–51. London: Serpent’s Tail. Ross, Andrew. 1989. “Uses of Camp.” In No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 135–70. London: Routledge. Routt, William D., and Richard J. Thompson. 1990. “ ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals.” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 1: 17–35. Rowe, Carel. 1982. The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend Within the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Sargeant, Jack. 1995. Deathtripping: An Illustrated History of the Cinema of Transgression. London: Creation. Short, Robert. 2002. The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema. London: Creation. Siegel, Marc. 1997. “Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.” In Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, edited by Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, 91–106. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 2014a. “. . . For MM.” In “Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World,” edited by Marc Siegel, special issue of Criticism 56, no. 2: 361–74. ——, ed. 2014b. “Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World.” Special issue of Criticism 56, no. 2. Simmon, Scott. n.d. “Rose Hobart.” National Film Preservation Foundation. https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening -room/rose-hobart-1936#. Sitney, P. Adams. 1979. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 1997. “Factory Inspected.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 69 and 115. Smith, Imogen Sara. 2018. “Mistress of Ceremonies.” Criterion Collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5584-mistress-of-cere monies. Smith, Jack. 1962. Journal. Jack Smith Archive, Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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——. 1962–1963. “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez.” Film Culture 27 (Winter): 28–36. ——. 1963. “Maria Montez Voice Competition.” Village Voice, October 24, n.p. ——. 1963–1964a. “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” Film Culture 31 (Winter): 4–5. ——. 1963–1964b. “The Memoirs of Maria Montez, or Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool.” Film Culture 31 (Winter): 3–4. ——. 1966. “Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis.” Film Culture 40 (Spring): 13–14. ——. 1990. Jack Smith: Historical Treasures. Edited by Ira Cohen. New York: Hanuman. ——. [1964] 1992. “The Astrology of a Movie Scorpio.” Film Culture 76 (June): 23–26. ——. 1997a. Jack Smith, Les Evening Gowns Damnées; 56 Ludlow Street 1962–1964. Audio ArtKive vol. 1. Atlanta: Tony Conrad’s Audio ArtKive. ——. 1997b. Jack Smith, Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island: 56 Ludlow Street 1962–1964. Audio ArtKive vol. 2. Atlanta: Tony Conrad’s Audio ArtKive. ——. 1997c. “Statements, ‘Ravings,’ and Epigrams.” In Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell, 151–56. London: Serpent’s Tail/ High Risk. ——. 1997d. Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith. Edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell. London: Serpent’s Tail/High Risk. ——. [1962] 2002. The Beautiful Book. New York: Granary/Plaster Foundation. ——. 2013. Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: Artwork, Ephemera, and Photography by Jack Smith. Edited by Johan Kugelberg and John Zorn. New York: Boo-Hooray. Smith, Jack, and Ken Jacobs. 1963. “Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra.” Film Culture 29 (Summer): 2–3. Sontag, Susan. 1964a. “A Feast for Open Eyes.” The Nation, April 13, 374–76. ——. 1964b. “Flaming Censorship.” The Nation, March 30, 311. ——. 1966. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 275–92. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Wakefield, Neville. 2011. “ ‘Jack Smith: Thanks for Explaining Me’ at Gladstone Gallery, NY.” Mousse Magazine, May 20. http://mousse maga zine . it / jack - smith - “thanks - for- explaining - me” - at - gladstone -gallery-new-york/. Warhol, Andy, and Pat Hackett. 1980. POPism: The Warhol ’60s. New York: Harper and Row. Zazeela, Marian. 1997. “Maja Rising.” Artforum 36, no. 2 (October): 72 and 119.

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INDEX

Note: FC in subheadings refers to Flaming Creatures. Adler, Joan, 21 Adler, Robert, 100 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Lubin, 1944), 2, 13, 23, 47–50, 55, 56 “Amapola” (sung by D. Durbin), 2, 58, 79 Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love” (Warhol, 1963), 34, 36 Angell, Callie, 34–35 Anger, Kenneth, 7, 35, 39, 44, 52 Anthology Film Archives, 110 Anticipation of the Night (Brakhage, 1958), 28 Arabian Nights (Rawlins, 1942), 53, 54, 55 Artforum, 109 Aumont, Jean-Pierre, 55

Beautiful Book, The (Smith), 17–18, 19, 65–66 “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (sung by Everly Brothers), 2, 48, 97 “Belated Appreciation of V.S.” (Smith), 13, 24, 63–64 Berkley, Busby, films of, 54, 68–69. See also Roman Scandals Bick, Sheila, 21, 22, 50, 58, 59f, 76f, 83, 85f, 90. See also Delicious Delores Bickford, Charles, 74 Blake, Nayland, 3, 57, 110–11 Blank City (Daniher, 2010), 107 Bleecker Street Cinema, 4, 28, 29, 31 Blonde Cobra (Jacobs, 1959–1963), 5–8; author’s first encounter with, 1–2; Lonely Little Boy episode, 95–96; Mekas on, 29–30, 31; screenings, 28, 32; Smith in, 6, 10, 15, 16f, 82–83; vampire in, 82–83, 89

B, Scott and Beth, 108 Baccus, Diana, 100 Batman Dracula (Warhol, 1964), 89–90, 102

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INDEX

Blonde Venus (von Sternberg, 1932), 5, 62 Boo-Hurray, 110 Brakhage, Stan, 3, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 52, 74 Breer, Robert, 3, 52 Breton, André, 73 Broughton, James, 44 Bryan, Winifred, 30, 81 Buzzards over Baghdad (Smith, 1950s), 55

Clarke, Shirley, 41–42, 107 Clifford, James, 9, 13–14 Cobra Woman (Siodmak, 1944), 5–6, 25, 54f, 55 Coming Attractions (Conrad, 1970), 108 Conrad, Tony: in FC, 19, 91; and the FC soundtrack, 18–19, 23–24, 50, 79, 80, 83–84; and “The First Memoirs of Maria Montez,” 20, 82; The Flicker, 84; and Normal Love, 90, 100; Re-framing Creatures, 23; and the Scotch Tape soundtrack, 79–80; on Smith, 43, 108; in Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, 104 Cooper, Gladys, 60–61, 61f Cornell, Joseph, 20, 74–76, 80. See also Rose Hobart Corrigan, Timothy, 93 Cuker, Eliot, 90, 100

Cale, John, 104 Camp (Warhol, 1965), 102 Cantor, Eddie, 68–71, 73–74. See also Roman Scandals “Carinhoso” (performed by E. Duchin), 79–80 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), 53 Cemeteries (Smith; lost/unfinished film), 18 Chamberlain, Wynn, 101 Chant d’amour, Un (Genet, 1950), 37–38 Chaplin, Charlie, 73 Charles Theatre, 28 Chelsea Girls, The (Warhol, 1966), 102, 103–4 Chien Andalou, Un (Buñuel, 1929), 39 China Night (Fushimizu, 1940), 79 “China Nights” (sung by Yamaguchi), 77, 79 “China Nights” Sequence, 47, 76–77, 76f, 79 Christmas on Earth (Rubin, 1963), 35, 41 Chumlum (Rice, 1964), 35, 94 Cinema 16 (film society), 28 Cinemaroc Movie Studios, 20, 50, 52, 57, 102. See also specific films and stars; Smith, Jack

Daniher, Celine, 107 Death of P’Town, The (Jacobs, 1961), 89 Deleuze, Gilles, 98 Delicious Delores (character), 50; “China Nights” Sequence, 47, 50, 76–77, 76f; interlude sequence, 48, 85–86, 85f; Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, 22, 48, 77, 77f, 79; Smirching Sequence, 47, 67, 68; White Blossom Sequence, 2, 47, 58–59, 59f, 62, 66 Deren, Maya, 3 Devil is a Woman, The (von Sternberg, 1935), 62, 91–92, 97 Dietrich, Marlene, 5, 17, 18, 56, 62–64, 64f, 66, 76

128

INDEX

di Giovanni, Frank, 60, 65. See also Francine, Francis Dog Star Man (Brakhage, 1961–1964), 29, 35 Dracula (Browning, 1931), 88 Dracula (character in films), 88, 89–90. See also Batman Dracula Dracula (Stoker novel), 88 Dripping Water (Wieland, 1969), 87 Durbin, Deanna. See “Amapola”

Flaming Creatures (Blind Remake) (Stupak, 2006), 8 Flaming Creature: The Art and Times of Jack Smith (1997 retrospective), 109 Flaming Creature: The Art and Times of Jack Smith (Leffingwell, Kismaric, and Heiferman), 109 Fleischner, Bob, 1, 5, 5–6, 15, 31, 93. See also Blonde Cobra Flicker, The (Conrad, 1966), 84 Flower Thief, The (Rice, 1960), 15, 28, 54, 81 Foreman, Richard, 3, 51, 105, 108 Francine, Francis: in The Beautiful Book, 18, 65; in “China Nights” Sequence, 47, 50, 76–77, 76f; named on cast card, 50; in Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, 22, 77, 79; in “Siboney” Sequence, 90–91, 91f; in Smirching Sequence, 21, 47, 66–68; in Smith’s journaled script/plans for FC, 21–22; in Spanish Girl Sequence, 92, 94; in Vampire Sequence, 88; in Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys, 102; in White Blossom sequence, 2, 47, 58–59, 60, 62 Frank, Robert, 107 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943), 100

East of Borneo (Melford, 1931), 20, 74. See also Rose Hobart Eat (Warhol, 1963–1964), 32, 102 Eberstadt, Isabel, 3, 14, 60 Eco, Umberto, 8 Empire (Warhol, 1964), 32, 102 Empire of the Senses (Oshima, 1976), 8 End Sequence, 97–98 Etting, Ruth, 69 Everly Brothers. See “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Fascinating Woman (character; aka Mary), 22, 48, 50, 62, 86 Film Culture magazine, 2, 24, 27, 32, 33–34, 37–38, 65, 82, 104. See also “Belated Appreciation of V.S.”; Mekas, Jonas; “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, 34–35, 104 Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 28, 37 “First Memoirs of Maria Montez, The” (Smith; performance piece), 20, 82 Flaherty Film Seminar (Battleboro, 1963), 32

Garland, Judy, 60–61, 61f Gidal, Peter, 110 Ginsberg, Allen, 42 Giorno, John, 100 Gladstone Gallery, 109, 111, 112 Godard, Jean-Luc, 35 Goldin, Nan, 108 Goldwyn Girls, 69–71, 71f

129

INDEX

Gramercy Arts Theater, 36 Grant, Barry K., 5 Grant, Beverly, 30, 34, 90, 100, 108 Great Pasty Triumph, The (Smith, 1963–1964). See Normal Love Gurin, David, 82

Jacobs, Ken: on “dirty-mouthed” films, 31; on FC, 46; “little-boy revolution” of Smith and, 80–81; and the New Cinema Festival (1965), 104; new film idiom developed, 15–16; obscenity charges against, 36, 41, 42; photograph of Smith, 65; and Rose Hobart, 75; on Smith, 6, 14, 16, 17, 52–53, 110; Smith’s collaborations with, 1, 5–6, 10, 15, 28, 80, 89, 95–96; in Smith’s Scotch Tape, 29. See also Blonde Cobra; Little Stabs at Happiness; Star Spangled to Death James, David E., 6–7, 81 Jarmusch, Jim, 107 Joffen, Jerry, 34 Johnson, Ray, 20 Jordan, Larry, 74 Jordan, Mary, 13, 109, 110. See also Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis Joseph, Branden W., 81, 82, 83–84, 94–95 Jungle Island (Smith, 1967), 110

Haircut (Warhol, 1963–1964), 32, 102 Haire, Reese, 29 Halberstam, Judith, 96 Harlot (Warhol, 1964), 57 Harlow, Jean, 57 Harrington, Stephanie Gervis, 37 Heath, Stephen, 8 Hedy (Warhol, 1966), 57, 102 Heliczer, Kate, 83 Heliczer, Piero, 17, 65, 83, 91, 104 Hobart, Rose, 20, 74, 76, 76. See also Rose Hobart Hoberman, J., 1, 23, 41, 53, 55–56, 108–9 Holzer, Jane, 30 Hyperbole Photography Studio, 16–17 Independent Film Award, 27, 32–34 Indiana, Gary, 51–52 Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), 110 Interlude sequence, 48, 85–87, 85f “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (sung by K. Kallen), 87 I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943), 100 I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo (Smith, 1967–1970s), 110

Karpf, Florence (Flo Jacobs), 36, 42 Kaster, Joseph, 37 Keaton, Buster, 73 “Keep Young and Beautiful” (sung by E. Cantor), 69–71, 73–74 Kelly, Gene, 60–61 Kelman, Ken, 39, 83 Kerness, Donna, 30 Kiss (Warhol, 1963–1964), 32, 102 Kuchar, George, 5, 7, 52, 108 Kuntzel, Thierry, 8

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (Jordan, 2007), 13, 14, 109, 110–11

Lake, Veronica, 88–89 Lamarr, Hedy, 57, 76

130

INDEX

Lecuona, Ernesto, 91. See also “Siboney” Leffingwell, Edward, 105 Les Evening Gowns Damnées (Smith album), 83 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948), 8 Levine, Naomi, 30, 90, 102 Levy, Julien, 74, 75 Little Stabs at Happiness (Jacobs, 1959–1962), 15, 28, 29, 31 “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World” (conference), 109, 111 Lonesome Cowboys (Warhol, 1967–1968), 102 Lotringer, Sylvère, 14, 24, 43–44, 104

32–33; FC screened, 32–36, 39; and Genet’s Un Chant d’amour, 37–38; Jarmusch on, 107; on the new underground films, 29–32; and Smith exhibitions, 110; Smith’s disagreements with, 35, 43–44, 72–73, 108; Smith’s essays published, 24; on Smith’s Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis, 104; Sontag and, 39, 41; on a trip to Smith’s loft, 105–6; Vogel’s criticism of, 39–40 “Memoirs of Maria Montez, The” (Smith; essay), 87 Metrograph cinema, 112 Monroe, Marilyn, 89 Montez, Maria: career and death, 54–55; in Cobra Woman, 5–6, 25, 54f, 55; “The First Memoirs of Maria Montez” (Smith, performance piece), 20, 82; Mario Montez and, 57, 94; Smith’s fascination with, 2, 13, 20, 24–26, 48, 53–54, 55–56, 57–58, 75, 76, 89; Smith’s Normal Love and, 89, 100 (see also Normal Love); voice, 89. See also Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Montez, Mario (René Rivera): in The Beautiful Book, 18, 65–66; creation/name, 20, 57, 94; and FC, 23, 50, 66–68, 83, 92–93, 92f, 94; named underground luminary, 30; in Normal Love, 90, 100; in Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis, 104; in “The First Memoirs of Maria Montez,” 82; in Warhol’s works, 57, 102

MacLise, Angus, 21, 90, 93, 100, 104 Malanga, Gerard, 77, 89–90, 101 Malina, Judith, 22, 30, 50, 85f, 86. See also Fascinating Woman “Maria Montez Voice Competition” (Smith), 89 Mario Banana (Warhol, 1964), 102 Markman, Joel, 18, 21, 30, 48, 50, 65, 88–89, 97, 104. See also Our Lady of the Docks Markopoulos, Gregory, 29, 34, 35, 43, 44, 52 Martin, Adrian, 73 Martin, Marie, 8 Marx Brothers, 54, 68, 73 Mathijs, Ernest, 4–5 Mead, Taylor, 15, 30, 81, 81, 101–2 Mekas, Jonas, 2, 27–28; and censorship of Flaming Creatures, 33–42, 43–44; on FC, 24, 33; FC given Independent Film Award,

131

INDEX

Moon, Michael, 56–57, 84, 88, 89, 95–96 More Milk Yvette (Warhol, 1965), 102 Morocco (von Sternberg, 1930), 10, 62, 63 “Movie Journal” column (Mekas; Village Voice), 2, 27, 30–31, 32, 35–36, 104. See also Mekas, Jonas Museum of Modern Art, 110

Penny Arcade (performance artist), 108 “Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez, The” (Smith), 2, 24–26, 53–54, 90 Pirate, The (Minnelli, 1948), 54, 60–61, 61f Plaster Foundation, 109 Poe, Amos, 106 Poggi, Grace, 69 Polanski, Roman, 35 POPism: The Warhol ’60s (Warhol and Hackett), 101 Preston, Richard (Dick), 21, 51 P.S. 1 Museum, 44, 109

Nares, James, 107 Neruda, Pablo, 18 New American Cinema Group, 27–28, 33 New Bowery Theater, 36 New Cinema Festival (1965), 104 “No More Love” (Berkeley Busby revue number), 69 No President (Smith, 1967–1970), 9, 105, 110 Normal Love (Smith, 1963–1964), 45, 99–100; cast and characters, 90; conception of, 107; endlessly reedited, 105; Kelman on, 39; making filmed by Warhol, 34; material impounded, 36; remaking of, 9; rushes shown at FC screening, 32; screenings of, 110; soundtrack, 89; Tavel on, 55 No Wave film movement, 106–7

Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, The (Rice, 1963), 15, 31, 81 Re-framing Creatures (Conrad [1963]2009), 23 Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis (Smith; performance piece, 1965), 104–5 Reisman, David, 56 Respectable Creatures (Smith, 1950–1966), 55, 110 Ricard, René, 59–60, 100, 103 Rice, Ron, 17–18, 34; works, 15, 28, 29, 31, 35, 81, 94 (see also specific films) Rinder, Lawrence, 17, 64–65 Rivera, René, 20, 65. See also Montez, Mario Rockwood, Arnold, 18, 21, 48–49, 50, 65, 66, 83, 100, 102 Roman Scandals (Tuttle, 1933), 68–72, 71f, 73–74 Rose Hobart (Cornell, 1936), 20, 74–76, 80

Oiticica, Hélio, 108 Oldenburg, Claes, 100, 101 Orgy-Earthquake Sequence, 22, 23, 48, 77–85, 77f Our Lady of the Docks (character), 48, 50, 88–89, 90–94, 97. See also Markman, Joel Overstimulated (Smith, 1959), 93, 110, 112

132

INDEX

Rosenthal, Irving, 18, 21, 65, 93, 109 Ross, Andrew, 82 Rowe, Carel, 84 Rubin, Barbara, 33, 34, 35–36, 41

individuals); on FC, 99, 104; and the FC soundtrack, 18–19, 23, 78–79, 79 (see also Conrad, Tony); film outline for FC, 21–22; on his friends, 113; Hoberman on, 1; influence and legacy, 101–2, 106–7, 108–13; on light and shadows, 85; “little-boy revolution” of, 80–81, 96; manifesto, 25–26; named underground luminary, 30; necrophiliac aspect of cultism literalized, 82–83; in New York, 15–17, 56, 72, 106–7, 108; photography, 17–18, 60, 64–66 (see also The Beautiful Book); provisional, open-ended nature of works, 9, 98, 105–6, 107–8; retreat following FC, 99 (see also Normal Love); retrospectives, 44, 109–13; in Rice’s work, 81; secret-flix, 2, 25, 53–54, 56, 60, 66, 68–69, 81, 93, 100, 110 (see also specific films); “secret” or “catastrophic” remakes, 6, 7–9, 20, 98; sense of failure and despair, 6, 14, 16, 95, 96, 112–13; shooting of FC, 19, 20–23; “Sinbad Glick” personage, 10, 61; subjectivity, 10, 13–14; surrealism of, 13–14, 76, 96; surrealist method of collage, 7–10, 17, 98; and temporality, postponement, delay, 51–52, 101; trash aesthetic, 4, 7, 16, 80–82, 83, 111; unlocatability as person, 6; Zazeela on, 86. See also specific works and individuals Song for Rent (Smith, 1969), 110 Solomon, Norman, 20

Sargeant, Jack, 5 Scarlet Empress, The (von Sternberg, 1934), 62, 64f, 66 Schleifer, Marc, 50 Scotch Tape (Smith, 1959–1962), 23, 74, 79–80, 83, 110, 112 Screen Tests (Warhol, 1964), 102 Sennett, Mack, 77 Sexton, Jamie, 4–5 Sherman, Cindy, 108 Short, Robert, 73 “Siboney” (song by Lecuona), 90, 91, 93, 94, 97 “Siboney” Sequence, 90–91, 91f Siegel, Mark, 41 Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island (Smith album), 82 Simmon, Scot, 74–75 Sims, Gerald (“Jerry”), 5, 15, 29, 30, 36, 93, 95 Sitney, P. Adams, 17, 34, 35–36, 47, 51, 75, 81, 95, 102–3 Slater, Mary Sue, 109 Sleep (Warhol, 1963), 32, 100, 102 Smirching Sequence, 21, 47, 66–76 Smith, Jack, 16f; birth, parents, and childhood, 14–15; and camp, 56–58; and censorship of FC, 34–35, 42–44, 99 (see also Mekas, Jonas); on Dietrich, 62–64; on the “documentary element” of his work, 32; fascination with Hollywood, 2–3, 17, 52–54, 75–76, 82, 88–89, 102 (see also specific films and

133

INDEX

Sontag, Susan, 2, 29, 38–39, 41, 44, 46, 56 Spanish Girl (character), 48, 50, 92–93, 92f, 97 Spanish Girl Sequence, 91–96 Spider Woman, The (Neill, 1943), 100 Staiger, Janet, 42 Star Spangled to Death (Jacobs, 1957–1959, 2003–2004), 5, 15, 16, 28, 75, 95 Stern, Lesley, 8 Stevenson, Jack, 5 Stupak, Bec, 8 Suárez, Juan A., 44–45, 57, 72–73, 105, 107–8

Vanderbeek, Stan, 34 Varda, Agnès, 35 Village Voice, 30, 33–34, 36–37, 39–40, 41–42. See also “Movie Journal” column Vogel, Amos, 28, 39–41 Vogel, Marcia, 28 von Sternberg, Josef, 5, 17, 18, 24, 56, 56, 62–64, 66, 75. See also “Belated Appreciation of V.S.”; specific films Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (2013 exhibition), 110 Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (Smith), 109 Wakefield, Neville, 112–13 Ward, Eleanor, 100–101 Warhol, Andy: collaborations with Smith, 89–90, 101–2; at Film-Makers’ Cinematheque press conference, 34–35; Hollywood’s influence on, 52; Independent Film Award, 32; and Mario Montez, 57, 102; Smith contrasted with, 7, 96, 102–4; Smith on, 103; Smith’s influence on, 101–2; and Smith’s Normal Love, 34, 36, 100–101. See also specific works Waters, John, 5, 108 What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (Smith, 1981 performance piece), 55–56 White Blossom Sequence, 2, 47, 58–66, 59f White Savage (Lubin, 1943), 55, 80, 110

Tartaglia, Jerry, 26, 95, 111–12 Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort Of . . . (Warhol, 1963), 101–2 Taubin, Amy, 79 Tavel, Ronald, 30, 55–56, 57 Thanks for Explaining Me (exhibition), 109–10, 112 Theater of Eternal Music (Young piece), 19, 104 Third International Experimental Film Competition (Knokke-Le Zoute, Belgium, 1963), 35–36, 40 Three Loops for Performers and Tape Recorders (Conrad, 1961), 23 Tivoli Theatre, 32–33 Trumball, Leslie, 37 “Uncle Fishook and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art,” (Lotringer), 43–44 Vacarro, John, 90, 104, 108 Vampire Sequence, 87–90, 88

134

INDEX

Wilson, Robert, 52, 108 Wynn Gerry Claes (Warhol, 1963), 101

Zazeela, Marian: and The Beautiful Book, 18, 19, 65–66; Bick and, 22; in FC, 17, 21, 48, 50, 93, 94, 97, 97f; on Smith, 86; and Warhol, 102; and Young, 18, 104 Zedd, Nick, 5

Yellow Sequence, The (Smith, 1963–1965), 110 Young, La Monte, 18, 19, 21, 93, 104

135