Description
Book SynopsisBanned soon after its first midnight screenings, Jack Smith’s incendiary
Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. This study of Smith’s magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.
Trade ReviewConstantine Verevis's
Flaming Creatures dissects and maps with great affection the tangled network of intertextual appropriations Jack Smith performed in his landmark film. While the film has provoked censorship and admiration, scorn and expressions of the sublime, Verevis reveals Smith's "secret-flix" in rich detail, illuminating both aesthetic and cultural confrontations that now mark the transition to contemporary cinema. A feast of historical and filmic information. -- Janet Staiger, author of
Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film ReceptionFlaming Creatures offers a comprehensive study of this classic and controversial avant-garde film, from its production and reception history to its complex, even fraught, place in the New York experimental scene, to scene-by-scene meanings, performance styles, and overall artistic accomplishments. Verevis even uses his well-known talents as a top scholar of film remakes to clarify the film’s status as a complicated yet loving ode to Hollywood kitsch. -- Dana Polan, New York University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Background and Production
2. Reception and Controversy
3. The Film Work:
Flaming Creatures4. Aftermath and Legacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
