Flaming Creatures at the Tivoli Theatre
New York: Tivoli Theatre, [1963]. Offset. 9 x 11 ½ in. Near fine. Item #ANT168
Flaming Creatures was a film by the underground filmmaker Jack Smith that premiered in 1963 and became the center of a highly publicized obscenity trial. This flyer is for a screening at the Tivoli Theatre in December, 1963, just months before the arrests and trial that would make the film a cause célèbre of the underground film community. During its third showing at the Tivoli in March of 1964, the film was seized by the police and Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and Florence Karpf were arrested for organizing the screening.
The flyer also notes that rushes from Normal Love would be screened as part of the program. By 1964, Smith’s ethic of total resistance to codification and commercialization led him to only screen Normal Love as a live performance in which he would recut the filmstrip, feed sections back through the projector, play different records from his collection, and otherwise refuse to ever create a conventionally “finished” film.
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