A kind of pre-cockettes fantasy of sexual confusion, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures was one of the first “classics” of the New American Cinema. It was also the most maudit, and the most frequently seized (for “obscenity”) of underground films. Now it has achieved a stature such that Susan Sontag can state, “...(I)n defending as well as talking about the film, I don't want to make it seem less outrageous, less shocking than it is.... Smith's film is strictly a treat for the senses. In this it is the very opposite of a ‘literary' film (which is what so many French avant-garde films were). It is not in the knowing about, or being able to interpret, what one sees, that the pleasure of Flaming Creatures lies; but in the directness, the power, and the lavish quantity of the images themselves. Unlike most serious modern art, this work is not about the frustrations of consciousness, the dead ends of the self. Thus Smith's crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures - a sensibility which disclaims ideas, which situates itself beyond negation.
“Flaming Creatures is that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence. To be sure, this joyousness, this innocence is composed out of themes which are - by ordinary standards - perverse, decadent, at the least highly theatrical and artificial.” --“Against Interpretation”

From the mid-1960s on, Jack Smith has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influential performance pieces. Although Smith's theater, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based “performance artists” of the mid-1970s.
Tonight's screening of Flaming Creatures will be part of a performance by Jack Smith.

* The admission charge tonight covers both the 7:30 and 8:15 programs.