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.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 09 Nov 2023
- Time: 15:15
Location
- Spazio Alfieri - Via dell'Ulivo, 8, 50122 Florence
Organizer
-
Jack Smith
Jack Smith was an American film director, actor and artist. He collaborated with many artists and musicians from the New York underground scene, including Andy Warhol, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, influencing them with his unique and provocative style. He died in New York in 1989 at the age of 56.
