The marriage of Heaven and Hell presented with playful depravity. Flaming Creatures’ forty-five washed out, dated minutes depict a place where a cast of tacky transvestites and other terminal types (some costumed as recognizable genre faves – a Spanish dancer, a vampire, an exotic temptress), accompanied by recordings of popular music, shrieks, and snatches of Hollywood soundtracks (“Ali Baba is coming! Ali Baba is coming!”), dance, grope, stare, posture, and wave their penises with childlike joy. It was the first shocking manifestation of an aesthetic vision subsequently marketed as Camp, and later made palatable as Nostalgia. Writing in the same paper in 1972, Hobermandescribes the film’s powerful affect and the extreme reactions it elicited: Prints were confiscated by the state, Jonas Mekas and others arrested at a screening at the New Bowery Theater in March 1964.
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