Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures

Verevis, Constantine

Paperback

Series: Cultographies

Film StudiesGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 0231191472
ISBN13: 9780231191470
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: Nov 26 2019
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.30 Depth: 6.90
Language: English

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.

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