Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures PDF Author: Constantine Verevis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231851308
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 86

Book Description
Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and a searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted artistic work with exotic fragments drawn from the cinematic past. 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.

Flaming Creature

Flaming Creature PDF Author: Edward G. Leffingwell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Creator of the notorious film Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith astonished an international audience with his work in film, photography, theater, performance and the written word. Example and antagonist to generations of artists and performers'revered by Robert Wilson, denounced by Kenneth Anger, imitated by Andy Warhol?Jack Smith is ready for his close-up, on location in the streets and ruins of the world. This volume recognizes Smith's seminal contributions and the need for a significant rethinking of the history of the American avant-garde.

Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures PDF Author: Constantine Verevis
Publisher: Cultographies
ISBN: 9780231191470
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Book Description
Banned 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.

Sixty-six Frames

Sixty-six Frames PDF Author: Gordon Ball
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
'66 Frames chronicles encounters with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and many others as - in the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti - "the young Southern innocent sets forth in all his whiteness to find himself among visionary New York poets and other flaming creatures." Gordon Ball offers a swirl of sixties life - working as assistant to film pioneer Jonas Mekas in his Third Avenue loft; visits with Andy Warhol at his Factory; antiwar marches - in a journey through the decade that took visual imagery outside the box, beyond the frame.

Essential Cinema

Essential Cinema PDF Author: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801878403
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
A cogent and provocative argument about the art of film, Essential Cinema is a fiercely independent reference book of must-see movies for film lovers everywhere.

Freedom to Offend

Freedom to Offend PDF Author: Raymond Haberski
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813172152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In the postwar era, the lure of controversy sold movie tickets as much as the promise of entertainment did. In Freedom to Offend, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. investigates the movie culture that emerged as official censorship declined and details how the struggle to free the screen has influenced our contemporary understanding of art and taste. These conflicts over film content were fought largely in the theaters and courts of New York City in the decades following World War II. Many of the regulators and religious leaders who sought to ensure that no questionable content invaded the public consciousness were headquartered in New York, as were the critics, exhibitors, and activists who sought to expand the options available to moviegoers. Despite Hollywood’s dominance of film production, New York proved to be not only the arena for struggles over film content but also the market where the financial fates of movies were sealed. Advocates for a wider range of cinematic expression eventually prevailed against the forces of censorship, but Freedom to Offend is no simple homily on the triumph of freedom from repression. In his analysis of controversies surrounding films from The Bicycle Thief to Deep Throat, Haberski offers a cautionary tale about the responsible use of the twin privileges of free choice and free expression. In the libertine 1970s, arguments in favor of the public’s right to see challenging and artistic films were twisted to provide intellectual cover for movies created solely to lure viewers with outrageous or titillating material. Social critics who stood against this emerging trend were lumped in with the earlier crusaders for censorship, though their criticism was usually rational rather than moralistic in nature. Freedom to Offend calls attention to what was lost as well as what was gained when movie culture freed itself from the restrictions of the early postwar years. Haberski exposes the unquestioning defense of the doctrine of free expression as a form of absolutism that mirrors the censorial impulse found among the postwar era’s restrictive moral guardians. Beginning in New York and spreading across America throughout the twentieth century, the battles between these opposing worldviews set the stage for debates on the social effects of the work of artists and filmmakers.

The Blazing World and Other Writings

The Blazing World and Other Writings PDF Author: Margaret Cavendish
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141904828
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

Beyond the Dream Syndicate

Beyond the Dream Syndicate PDF Author: Branden Wayne Joseph
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781890951870
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Tony Conrad has significantly influenced cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, "concept art," postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Creator of the "structural" film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has eluded canonic histories. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Such an approach simultaneously illuminates and estranges current understandings of the period, redrawing the map across medium and stylistic boundaries to reveal a constitutive hybridization at the base of the decade's artistic development. This exploration of Conrad and his milieu goes beyond the presentation of a relatively overlooked oeuvre to chart multiple, contestatory regimes of power simultaneously in play during the pivotal moment of the 1960s. From the sovereign authority invoked by Young's music, to the "paranoiac" politics of Flynt, to the immanent control modeled by Conrad's films, each avant-garde project examined reveals an investment within a particular structure of power and resistance, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the artistic and political stakes that continue to define our time.

Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool

Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool PDF Author: Jack Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781852424282
Category : Motion picture literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'During thirty years ... as a filmmaker, photographer, and performer, Jack Smith produced a body of creative, antic writing that intersects and transcends the genres of hothouse fantasy, criticism, and social comment. Bringing together long unavailable essays, performance scripts, interviews, and other material, [this compilation] reveals the ideas and personality of an artist whose distinctive vision has influenced generations of filmmakers and performance artists"--Provided by publisher.

On Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (and Other Secret-flix of Cinemaroc)

On Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (and Other Secret-flix of Cinemaroc) PDF Author: J. Hoberman
Publisher: Hips Road/Tzadik
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
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.