Flaming Creatures / / Constantine Verevis.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Verevis, Constantine,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Cultographies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 16 film stills

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. BACKGROUND AND PRODUCTION -- 2. RECEPTION AND CONTROVERSY -- 3. THE FILM WORK: FLAMING CREATURES -- 4. AFTERMATH AND LEGACY -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX