On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures

Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America. J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making--and legal unmaking--of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters. Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of Flaming Creatures is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.