FLAMING CREATURES
Co-Presented with QFest Film Festival
Saturday, July 23, 3:30PM
$10 (Free for Aurora members and QFest passholders)
In collaboration with QFest, Aurora Picture Show presents a special screening of Flaming Creatures and other films made in the 1960s by transgressive queer artist Jack Smith. A pioneer of underground cinema, performance art, and “camp” aesthetics, Smith grew up in Galveston and Houston before moving to New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1950s and creating for himself a radical intertwining of life, art, play, and personal mythology. He loved Hollywood B-movie kitsch, worshipped the exotic screen diva Maria Montez (whom he called “the Miraculous One”), and saw cinema as "a place where it is possible to clown, to pose, to act out fantasies.” His most known film, Flaming Creatures, is an ethereal montage of writhing demimonde filmed on the rooftop of an old movie theater using black-and-white film stock he’d stolen from the “expired” bin of a local camera shop. Its collaged tape soundtrack is by Tony Conrad. Smith described the film as a haunted comedy, but authorities called it something else. Police seized the film at its 1963 New York premiere for its “obscene” depictions and it was subsequently banned in 22 states. Doors were locked during its student screening at Houston’s University of St. Thomas. This program presents 16mm film prints of Smith’s influential and controversial Flaming Creatures (1963) and his short films Scotch Tape (1962) and Song For Rent (1969). For mature audiences.
"I genuflect before Jack Smith, the only true 'underground' filmmaker." –John Waters
"He was uncompromising. He had everything." –Robert Wilson
"Gadfly, trickster, visionary—Jack Smith changed the art world.” –Laurie Anderson
“The only person I would ever copy. He's just so terrific, and I think he makes the best movies.” –Andy Warhol
"For Smith, one suspects, art wasn't bigger or smaller than life; it was life—messy, silly, awful, grand, and above all transformative." –Holland Cotter, New York Times
“At once primitive and sophisticated…Flaming Creatures was something new. Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among the great visionaries of American film.” –J. Hoberman
