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Flaming Creatures is a 43-minute experimental medium-length film from 1963 directed by Jack Smith. The film is considered one of the most significant works of the New American Cinema.
In a film magazine of the time, a Lithuanian film critic, naturalized American, even wrote that Flaming Creatures is the most important American film of the post-war period!
It is an experimental film, practically impossible to categorize in a genre, but I can tell you something about the footage.
The film has no plot, no dialogue, no beginning, development, or end. It is thus a flow of images supported by a soundtrack composed of various musical pieces.
Jack Smith, at the time, used to hold little parties on the terrace of a rundown American cinema, in the slums, near Brooklyn... but not even in Brooklyn but rather its adjacent neighborhood (I don't remember the name) even dirtier and more run-down... it's like in Rome you say Garbatella but instead you're in Tormarancio (on the wrong side of Colombo).
What is the film "about"? The film doesn't talk, I've already said that. The film captures snippets of the parties that Jack organized on the terrace; he called them Sherazade Parties. They were wild, improvised parties, filled with sex and presumably drugs and rock and roll…
Jack, with his small camera, simply roams among the people "en travesti" - men dressed as women, women dressed as men, half-naked, half-crazy, half "free". Half orgies, half rapes, dicks out, hairy pussies, tits out, you can't understand anything, it's all symbolic, it's all figurative, it's all real.
He captures on expired black-and-white film, the effect is disorienting, annoying, it looks like a poorly made Dreyer film from the 30s, very poorly. The film literally falls apart, the glaring light bursts into blinding white, the sound, distorted as well, accompanies the images.
Before the following consideration, I will tell you that I found one thing really interesting, remarkable, strong: the choice of musical pieces that changed according to the sequences. They were, how to say, "perfect" (and this is the worst compliment you can give to this film).
Having said that, it makes no sense to review this rotten and delirious work "technically" (visually it's an unprecedented piece of crap) but I realize that by trying to attribute adjectives to describe it, I am already taking a stance. I take a stance in the conventional world, made of rules (millennia-old), of superstructures, of clichés, of rules, little rules, of lines, and Flaming Creatures doesn't go beyond the lines, Flaming Creatures erases the lines.
And that's the meaning of the work, a protest shout, screamed at the top of their lungs by a thousand Tarzans, to America and its damn "dream", to the bourgeois, the bigots, the whole shebang. A critique of the system, fierce, wild, obscene, a slap in the face with a ring, an F-you shouted by a chorus of drunk mountain men (but weren’t they a thousand Tarzans? but who cares, it's the same...) on the mountain top with the echo resonating down to the valley, to the village, to the church, making the wooden pews tremble, lifting the dust in the sacristy... without overthinking it too much, unlike his European colleagues, I think of an Antonioni, a Truffaut, a Buñuel…
In March 1964, the police raided a movie theater in New York, seizing a copy and banning its screening in the State on charges of obscenity. Jonas Mekas, Susan Sontag, Shirley Clarke, Allen Ginsberg, and other intellectuals rallied in defense of the free circulation of the film, giving rise to a famous legal battle.
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