On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (and other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc). J. Hoberman. Granary Books & Hip’s Road. 2001.

On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (and other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc).

Granary Books & Hip’s Road, 2001. Item #GB_98
ISBN: 9781887123525

8 x 11 in., 144 pp., smyth-sewn in wrappers.

“Reviled, rioted over, and banned as pornographic—even as it was recognized as an unprecedented masterpiece—Jack Smith’s 1963 Flaming Creatures is the most important and influential underground movie ever released in America. [This] 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, as well as a scandal taken as far as the United States Supreme Court, described by its maker as ‘a comedy set in a haunted movie studio.’

"The story of Flaming Creatures is augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs [by Norman Solomon].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 Jack Smith retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on Smith’s unfinished features—Normal Love and No President—and shorter film fragments, as well as on a few of his preferred Hollywood movies.”
–J. Hoberman

Designed by Heung-Heung Chin. Printed offset, llustrated in color and black and white. This is from an edition of 1500 copies in wrappers. The Granary / Hip's Road first edition is out-of-print. The subsequent Hip's Road printing is available from Tzadik.




ABOUT J. HOBERMAN

Further reading: 
collected reviews and press, including David Grubbs in Bookforum, Maitland McDonagh in Film Comment, Steve Erickson in Senses of Cinema, C. Carr in Village Voice, and Edwin Pouncey in The Wire.

Out of Stock