#flaming creatures

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Flaming Creatures (1963)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onNov 11, 2025

[celluloidrainbow]

FLAMING CREATURES (1963) dir. Jack Smith This experimental piece begins humorously enough with several people, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn. (link in title)

[bitter69uk]

“Jack Smith was a visionary performance artist and underground filmmaker who produced and directed a series of no-budget films during the 1950s and 1960s, the most famous being Flaming Creatures and Normal Love both from 1963. Smith peopled his camp b-movie melodramas with friends and often shot them on out-of-date film stock. As a filmmaker he seemed often careless about the fate of his movies, but their success and influence were far greater than the size of the audience that saw them. John Waters hailed Smith as “the only true underground filmmaker.” Susan Sontag described the controversial and allegedly pornographic Flaming Creatures as “a rare modern work of art; about joy and innocence.” While Andy Warhol said Smith was the only filmmaker he would steal from.”

/ From the article “Flaming Creatures: Icon of Perversion Jack Smith’s Fabulous Photographs” on the Dangerous Minds website, 2014 /

“Born in 1932, Smith came of age with other cultural rebels, but he wasn’t so much unwilling as genuinely unable to conform. What interested him was that state of mind one enters while creating, and that’s what he wanted to show on stage or screen. He didn’t care about finished products. He made the most important avant-garde film in America, then never completed any of his other films. He was known for actually re-editing during screenings. As for performances, no two were alike. He did not believe in acting, which was “hoodwinking,” or in memorizing lines, which rendered one “a mynah bird.””

/ From the article “Flaming Intrigue” by Cynthia Carr in the 2 March 2004 edition of The Village Voice /

Born on this day: pioneering American performance artist, photographer, one of the architects of underground queer cinema and all-round twisted prophet, that flaming creature Jack Smith (14 November 1932 – 18 September 1989). A “filth elder” to be mentioned in the same breath as Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar brothers and James Bidgood and a role model for the ages, Smith is an integral figure in the aesthetic we now call “camp” or “kitsch.”

[lifethroughaqueerlens]

Flaming Creatures

Our most recent episode of Life Through a Queer Lens discusses the life and history-defining work of Kylar Broadus, an anti-discrimination lawyer, and transgender legal pioneer. Of course, like (almost) every episode, we end with an interesting fact, with this week being about the film Flaming Creatures, released the same year Kylar was born.

To learn more about queer history that is always far more recent than we realize while having fun along the way, then check us out at the link in our bio or wherever you catch your favorite podcasts.

[haveyouseenthisqueerfilm]

Have you seen Flaming Creatures (1963)?

Yes

No

I've never heard of this film

Voting ended onApr 30, 2024

[wetgeliscasualinterval]

“Flaming Creatures” (1963) by Jack Smith

[travsd]

Jack Smith Would Be 90 Today

Jack Smith Would Be 90 Today

I owe more than I can say than I can say to the 1991 book Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, which goes far beyond its title to contextualize the films at its center, painting a continuum that connected underground cinema, off-off Broadway theatre, the Beats, performance art, visual art, and the climate in which the closeted lifestyles of the 1950s finally exploded into the…

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[dare-g]

Flaming Creatures (1963)