Thus Hitchcock paved the way for another kind of freedom - the kind enjoyed today by a Quentin Tarantino depicting any of his latest grudge matches rather than freedom for any hedonistic disciple of Jack Smith.

So he took the easy way out and opted for “redemptive” butchery to reveal the proper moral response to such a spectacle. This leads me to conclude that if Alfred Hitchcock had had the unbridled nerve and savagery in 1960 to simply show a nude Janet Leigh taking a shower in ‘Psycho’ and enjoying it rather than show her body double getting slashed to ribbons with a knife, he might well have faced serious trouble with puritanical American censors. Smith saw the movie strictly as a comedy and eventually became so alienated by Mekas’s rhetorical and institutional appropriation of it that he never made another film that achieved a final form.” The object of repeated police raids, it quickly became a cause cel è bre for free speech in general and ‘underground cinema’ in particular, especially as these were being defined by critic and programmer Mekas, the film’s most vocal champion at the time. It’s an act of love, not of revenge.”īut “historically, the impact of ‘Flaming Creatures’ in 1963 had less to do with this love than with its presumed sexual content: flaccid penises, bouncing breasts, evocations of an orgy. Love Wastes Andy Hardy’….’Flaming Creatures’ is mesmerizing and luscious partly because Smith is more interested in emulating various features starring Maria Montez or directed by Josef von Sternberg than in subverting them. In this respect it shares a kinship with found-footage films that use mainstream material - a relatively recent tradition stretching all the way from Craig Baldwin to Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’ to…Martin Arnold’s ‘Alone. Apart from Joseph Cornell’s ‘Rose Hobart’ (1939), ‘Flaming Creatures’ may be the first major avant-garde movie to have embraced Hollywood even as it more implicitly defied its narrative procedures.

As I wrote in the Chicago Reader 21 years ago, “Implicitly or explicitly, all avant-garde cinema has a dialectical relationship to mainstream cinema, which usually means Hollywood.

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