Film Details

Critic J. Hoberman calls Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures “the most liberating Underground movie of the sixties…also the most notorious.” (It was banned repeatedly.) Inspired by such trashy and exotic 1940s Technicolor fantasies as Cobra Woman and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the movie depicts a makeshift harem where an odd assortment of transvestites and women play “dress up” and thrash around, half naked, in a nonstop orgiastic frenzy. “The most important avant-garde film ever made in America.” –David Ehrenstein. Preceded at 9:30 by Barbara’s Rubin’s controversial, confrontational, double-screen projection of sex and genitalia, Christmas on Earth (USA, 1963), also marking its 50^th anniversary this year.