Jack Smith's 1963 short Flaming Creatures might be one of the most sexual perverse film ever made. It has ever amount of sexual deviance that made up the New York underground in the 1960's- transexuals, S&M, lines such as "do they make a lipstick that doesn't come off when you s*** c****?", drug use, and a radically innovative orgy scene that plays more like a Greek tragedy than a work of pornography. On the surface, Flaming Creatures appears to be art at its lowest, but a closer examination of the film proves that Flaming Creatures is not only high art, but a siminal piece of film in the cannon of The New American Cinema. Filmed on top of Smith's New York studio on a basic 16mm camera, Flaming Creatures embodies the true independent spirit of The New American Cinema. The orgy scene in the film is perhaps the greatest combination of art and film. The "creatures", as Smith puts them, engage in a rape-orgy scene of sailors and a transexual. The orgy plays like a tragic meeting the old America with the freshly birthed new morality in America. What is even more remarkable is the "earthquake", caused Smith's shaking camera at the end of the orgy. It as if the world is opening up on Smith's creatures and swallowing them and all their perversions. No one can deny that Flaming Creatures is a difficult film to watch- both in its content and deep artistic meanings, but the spirit of the film is the reason it should be preserved for generations to come.
Review of Flaming Creatures
Flaming Creatures
(1963)
Jack Smith's Masterpiece of Sexual Perversion and Dionysian Art
13 October 1999