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FLAMING CREATURES
USA | 1963 | 45 min
In 1962, Jack Smith threw a `Scheherazade party’ lasting for seven consecutive weekends on the roof of a movie theatre in the Lower East Side. The film director and his friends, clad in various styles of drag, staged for the camera an imaginary transvestite orgy. The result of a mix of baroque exoticism, garish clothing, and rubble retrieved from city streets, Flaming Creatures is a Dionysian, anti-narrative orgy featuring frenzied dances to the rhythm of German tangoes and Latin American pop songs that make up the sound track. A carnivalesque folly that is mirrored in the chaotic density of its formal composition and deliberate spatial disorientation in a pansexual scenery of entangled bodies. The experimental zenith of New American Cinema and a work that at its release brought havoc in the theatres where it was screening, including legal charges and arrests. It deserves a comeback today, in all its flaming irreverence.