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Ronald Gregg Immersion in the Materiality of the World, but Is Also Thoroughly Textual and Discursive

Ronald Gregg Immersion in the Materiality of the World, but Is Also Thoroughly Textual and Discursive

situations with mythological figures and astro- as Anger’s and Jarman’s). In addition, magic logical forces – the bikers as avatars of ‘Scorpio’, gave Anger ample license to dwell on over-the- PART III the sign of destruction, masculinity and deadli- top ‘couture’, exuberant accessorising, deliber- ness, but also of illumination and healing. Here, ate gesture and glossy surface. The filmmaker fetishism does not cover up a gap but generates has always taken great pleasure in showing how intensities and elaborate chains of affect that the right clothing at the right time may produce connect body parts, costumes and accessories. the most astonishing images. And magic clothed These chains of affect bypass the interper- his sartorial flirtation and heterodox sexuality sonal and the psychological. Anger’s fetishism in transcendent robes. is not a conduit for personalised pleasure but an energy that opens up lines of connection and Research for this paper was funded by the Spanish correspondence across the surface of the world. Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación: MICINN-Project FFI!$$&-$'(%). Invoking once more Marcel Mauss’s terminol- ogy, we could say that it is a way to pursue mana: the generic term for a universally acknowl- edged force whose name changes across the globe: ‘… a sort of fourth spatial dimension … power par excellence, the genuine effectiveness Fashion, Thrift Stores and the of things.’ #$ Mana cures and damages, brings together and separates, may be beneficent or malignant. It is an agency that is concrete and Space of Pleasure in the Queer abstract, material and spiritual, that inhabits things but also runs through them and puts them in communication. It may be identified with a place, a subject, an object (a fetish), and with the energy circulating through them under the tutelage of the theurgist, the only one who may channel or understand it. Trying to invoke and apprehend it might be painful at times because it will not always yield to the magician’s will. In this regard, the management of mana – which is Mauss’s definition of magic – con- verges with fetishism and sexuality. Like sex, magic mixes pleasure and the illusion of control with intimations of danger, and it is ritualistic, fetishistic (the term originally referred to an object with magical properties) and suspense- ful. It brings the body into play and entails an Ronald Gregg immersion in the materiality of the world, but is also thoroughly textual and discursive. It involves a careful use of fabrics, images and props, and it is, in addition, fully symbolic, mediated through narrative, incantation and formula – like Anger’s films. Anger’s cinematic magic, with its sexual and textural accompaniments, stages a grand refusal – as he once put it – of ‘the Cartesian frontal framework’. #% It is a defence of alterna- tive systems of cognition and figuration that have been suppressed by hegemonic rationality but have survived in experimental art and film !& Benjamin (n 15) [B",!], 79. (Maya Deren’s and Harry Smith’s films, as well !" Ibid: [B#,&], 69.

#$ Mauss (n 24) 117. !"! #% Anger and Rayns (n 25) 24. In her 1964 review and defence of Jack Smith’s constrained by later schooling. In his highly influ- film (1963) in The Nation, ential 1963 manifesto Metaphors on Vision, the shortly after it had been confiscated by the police experimental filmmaker issued a for obscenity, Susan Sontag argues that the film call for precisely such childlike innocence: is not pornographic, as its censors claimed, but Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of instead is ‘childlike and witty’ and ‘about joy and perspective, an eye unprejudiced by composi- innocence’. She notes that Smith is ‘visually very tional logic, an eye which does not respond to generous’ – ‘at practically every moment there is the name of everything but which must know simply a tremendous amount to see on the screen’. each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are She argues that Smith’s Boschlike vision of ‘“crea- there in a field of grass to the crawling baby tures”, flaming out in intersexual, polymorphous unaware of ‘Green?’ … Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering joy’ is ‘not the space of moral ideas … there is also A aesthetic space, the space of pleasure. Here with an endless variety of movement and innu- Smith’s film moves and has its being.’ $ merable gradations of color. Imagine a world before ‘the beginning was the word’. & Since much recent scholarship on Flaming Creatures has focused on its censorship, rep- Brakhage urged artists to ‘[a]llow so-called hal- resentation of queer sexuality, or critique of lucination to enter the realm of perception, … gender à la Judith Butler, it may be difficult for accept dream visions, day-dreams or night- viewers whose understanding of the film is shaped dreams, as you would so-called real scenes’. ' by these debates to appreciate what Sontag means Brakhage’s manifesto calls upon the filmmaker when she claims that the film is ‘about joy and to return to a visionary place like childhood in innocence’ and that it should be seen within ‘an order to liberate her/himself from the narrow- aesthetic space, the space of pleasure’. Some ness and restrictions of lingual, artistic and tech- scholars in fact dismiss Sontag’s defence of the nical conventions. Similarly, in praising Flaming film, claiming that she defangs Smith’s radical Creatures’ ‘aesthetic space’ and ‘childlike’ demean- challenge to gender and sexual norms. Michael our, Sontag values Jack Smith’s own belief that Moon, for one, writes: ‘[O]ne may well be struck grass was not limited to one colour of green. His rereading her essays by the extreme degree to ‘willful technical crudity’, she posits, embodies which they depoliticize the sexual and artistic ‘the belief … that neatness and carefulness of practices that are their subjects.’ ! Marc Siegel technique interfere with spontaneity, with truth, agrees, taking Sontag to task for her ‘denial of the with immediacy’. ( very possibility of sexual politics’ in her review. % Flaming Creatures was among a number of Taking a different approach, Juan A Suárez notes films to emerge out of the 1960s New York that Smith himself eventually came to challenge underground cinema that paid little heed to con- Sontag, claiming that by locating the film within ventions of narrative and spatial as well as tem- ‘an aesthetic space’, she turned it into ‘a besieged poral continuity. Instead, it focused on and high art piece’ and robbed it of its humour and re-created the sensuous pleasures of dazzling, joy. # In contrast to these criticisms, I would argue ostentatious fashions, spectacular mise en scènes that Sontag’s nuanced analysis understands and and exaggerated acting associated with a particu- celebrates Flaming Creatures on multiple levels: lar period of Hollywood cinema – an approach $ Susan Sontag, ‘Jack Smith’s Flaming Culture, and Gay Identities in the !"#$s as well as appreciating the film’s visual pleasures which was also fundamental to some remarkable Creatures’ in Against Interpretation Underground Cinema, Indiana University and the aesthetic critique of the conventions of colour films of the decade, namely Smith’s own and Other Essays, Delta, 1966: 226–31. Press, 1996: 187. dominant cinema, she recognises its wit and the (1963), ’s Chumlum (1964) ! Michael Moon, ‘Flaming Closets’ in & Stan Brakhage, ‘From Metaphors on challenge it posed to the political and moral con- and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1966). This Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Vision’ in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader servatism that resulted in its confiscation. approach is in line with that of the ‘cinema of Essays on Popular Culture, eds Corey of Theory and Criticism, ed P Adams Terms such as ‘childlike’ and ‘innocence’ attractions’ whose emphasis on exhibition and K Creekmur and Alexander Doty, Duke Sitney, , 1978: that Sontag used to describe the film had a very spectacle over ‘diegetic absorption’ and narra- University Press, 1995: 289. 120. particular meaning in the avant-garde circles of tive, according to film historian Tom Gunning, % Marc Siegel, ‘Documentary that Dare / ' Ibid. Not Speak its Name: Jack Smith’s the early 1960s. They bespoke a praiseworthy dominated the first decade of silent cinema. As ( Sontag (n 1) 228. return to a pre-socialised, pre-scripted state of Gunning explains, the ‘cinema of attractions’ was Flaming Creatures’ in Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay subjectivity, a state where moral rules do not supplanted by an emphasis on narrative in clas- Documentary, eds Chris Holmlund and apply and vision and technique have not been sical Hollywood cinema, but it continued to Cynthia Fuchs, University of Minnesota Press, 1997: 99. A Frame enlargements from Flaming Creatures, dir Jack Smith, 1963. # Juan A Suárez, Bike Boys, Queens, !"# Courtesy The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass influence musicals and other genres and erupted Like so many artists in the 1960s under- Hollywood spectacle was their inspiration. postcards, photographs, films and movie maga- again in certain avant-garde films. ! Gunning ground scene, Smith and Montez struggled to pay Rodriguez-Soltero told me that he often watched zines, both Smith and Montez became masters notes: the rent and feed themselves on the Lower East films with Montez and Smith in Montez’s apart- of the found object, the throwaway, the vintage Side of . J Hoberman notes that Smith’s ment. They were such an inspiration that even and the forgotten. Both seized upon the ephem- It is possible that this earlier carnival of the cin- ema, and the methods of popular entertainment, ‘was a marginal existence lived on the edge of when Montez was performing in The Ridiculous eral, the mass-produced, the childlike and the still provide an unexhausted resource – a Coney bohemian squalor’. ## In his review of Flaming Theatrical Company productions, he would run mouldy and used these to emulate the worlds Island of the avant-garde, whose never domi- Creatures, describes home as soon as he was done to ‘see a film like created by von Sternberg and Universal’s design- nant but always sensed current can be traced Smith’s near-poverty. ‘He starves,’ Markopoulos Gold Diggers of 1935 [Busby Berkeley, 1935] or The ers. They furnished their rooms, as Smith’s biog- from Méliès through Keaton, through Un Chien wrote; ‘he subsists on days old oatmeal and fried, Barefoot Contessa [Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1954] rapher Edward Leffingwell puts it, ‘with pick- andalou (1928), and Jack Smith." sautéed onions’ in order to ‘suffer and work in on television’. #( ings from the invisible department store of the Smith, together with his star, the actor Mario ’. #% The Puerto Rican-born drag Smith and Montez’s immersion in Hollywood street’. #) Smith frequently outfitted his apart- Montez, and other experimental filmmakers and star also struggled, although his spectacle inspired both to turn their everyday ment so that it could serve as a fantasy set for actors provided a hallucinatory vision of them- job as an office worker allowed him to furnish his existence into lives of Hollywood fantasy. Both his photographic shoots, films, and theatrical selves as a ‘cinema of attractions’, discovering apartment with cheap department and thrift decorated their apartments in a faux-luxurious productions. Montez also adorned his apart- the freedom to ignore professional standards of store items. style inspired largely by Hollywood epics, par- ment in bold colours and spectacular décor. For filmmaking and dominant conventional narra- Both men were outspoken about social ine- ticularly the shadowy, lavishly textured films of several years, it featured a bathtub covered with tive structures. quality. Smith criticised the conspiracy of ‘an Josef von Sternberg and the Technicolor orien- two gold plastic laminated boards, a dining table Smith’s films, Rice’s Chumlum and unholy team of manufacturers, schools, govern- talist and South Sea spectacles produced by with lion’s feet, a maroon carpet and chartreuse Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe marked a departure ment, and churches’ which enforced conformity Universal Studios and starring Maria Montez. In sofa, and rainbow-coloured curtains. The cen- from much of the queer experimental film pro- through dependence and condemned people Arabian Nights (John Rawlins, 1942), Ali Baba trepiece of his living room was the television, duction of the previous two decades. Earlier who didn’t play the game to lives of poverty. #& and the Forty Thieves (, 1944), Cobra his entrée to Hollywood, which he decorated by films, such as Curtis Harrington’s Fragment of Responding to a question about his performance Woman (, 1944), Sudan (John placing a pearl necklace around the screen. #* Seeking (1946), Willard Maas’s Images in the in Ronald Tavel’s play Indira Gandhi’s Daring Rawlins, 1945) and other Montez vehicles, Smith in particular learned from the films Snow (1948) and Gregory Markopoulos’s Swain Device, Mario Montez compared his community’s Universal set designers created a sensuous back- of von Sternberg that he didn’t need colour or a (1950), depicted the psychological nightmares poverty to India’s and condemned the rich for drop of brightly coloured, jewelled interiors full large, expensive set to create a sumptuous, provoked by the pressures of gender and sexual ignoring the poor: of tapestries, curtains, tiles and columns inspired exotic visual world. As Andrew Sarris has noted, conformity. The formal dream-world narrative of by an orientalist fantasy of Moorish design. von Sternberg needed very little space to create Is it fair that people are starving? There are this earlier cinema chillingly evokes the moral people starving here too. I was almost starving Jack Smith and Mario Montez enthusiasti- his mise en scène, which was ‘not the meaning- and psychological oppression of queer desire last year. I had a part-time job and I was only cally imitated the excess of these films. But less background of the drama, but its very and polymorphous subjectivity. But Flaming taking home about thirty dollars … I think these while Hollywood designers had enormous budg- subject, peering through nets, veils, screens, Creatures, Normal Love, Chumlum and Lupe trans- people who have money should all get together ets to create sets and costumes, Smith and shutters, bars, cages, mists, flowers and fabrics ported their audiences away from this despon- and put up a fund – a starvation fund – either for Montez had to rely on thrift shops and trash to tantalize the male with fantasies of the India or for the whole world – but they’re not #! dent narrative into a space of pleasure, via the considerate – they’re greedy. #' heaps to realise their fantasies. Like the assem- female’. Smith filmed the black-and-white fantastical world of Hollywood glamour, costum- blage artist Joseph Cornell, who scoured the Flaming Creatures on the rooftop of the Windsor ing and B-movie actresses. #$ How Smith and But as poor and embattled as they both were, used bookshops and record stores of Fourth Theater, a Lower East Side movie house, with Montez got there is worth pondering. Smith and Montez refused to live in abjection. Avenue to find bric-a-brac, engravings, books, outdated film stock, giving it a faded, ghostlike

! Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: #% Gregory Markopoulos, ‘Innocent Rivals’, Early Film, Its Spectator and the , vol 33, Summer 1964: 43. B C Avant-Garde’ in Early Cinema: Space- #& Edward Leffingwell, ‘Jack Smith: Frame-Narrative, ed Thomas Elsaesser, The Only Normal Man in Baghdad’ in British Film Institute, 1990: 57. Flaming Creature: Jack Smith, " Ibid: 61. His Amazing Life and Times, Serpent’s Tail, 1997: 70. #$ Such referencing of Hollywood cinema’s iconography and glamour, marked by #' Gary McColgen, ‘The Superstar: flamboyance and exaggeration, perhaps An Interview with Mario Montez’, Film most aligns this work to that of another Culture, vol 45, Summer 1967: 20. queer experimental filmmaker, Kenneth #( Ibid: 18. Anger. Yet, theirs are two strikingly B Maria Montez in Arabian Nights different forms of ‘confrontation’ with #) Leffingwell (n 13) 71. (frame enlargement), Hollywood. dir John Rawlins, 1942. #* McColgen (n 14) 18. ## J Hoberman, On Jack Smith’s Flaming C Maria Montez in #! Hoberman (n 11) 22. Creatures and Other Secret-Flix of (frame enlargement), Cinemaroc, Granary Books, 2001: 18. dir Robert Siodmak, 1944. quality. He painted a single backdrop of a large from shooting Normal Love.!! Following Smith, vase of flowers, but created the impression of a Rice created an extravagant orientalist aesthetic richer, multidimensional set through his varied consisting of swinging hammocks, brilliant fab- compositions and camera positions, moving rics and exotically dressed and bejewelled char- from a static tableau vivant to swirling actors acters in various poses and movements. But dancing like dervishes, shot from overhead. The Chumlum departs from Normal Love in several exoticism of the set, costumes and actors was ways, above all in composing its dazzlingly rich heightened by Smith’s choice of orientalist and images as multiple in-camera superimpositions pop music for the soundtrack. where moving bodies, jewellery, costumes, cur- After Flaming Creatures, Smith shot Normal tains and hammock netting all fuse into one. The Love, the ‘lovely, pasty, pink and green color superimposed scenes, often seen from different movie’, #" as he described it, which drew upon a viewpoints, create vibrant, colourful layers that ‘whole gaudy array of secret-flix’ !$ including make the film more abstract and psychedelic Hollywood horror films and Maria Montez and than theatrical. Busby Berkeley spectaculars. Smith and Montez drew upon the same called it Smith’s ‘pink-yellow Chinese-Arabic Hollywood sources when they designed cos- dream’. !# Here Smith shifted from black and tumes for their film and theatrical productions. white to colour, and from an urban rooftop to The costumes designed for Maria Montez by plein-air settings on Fire Island and in Old Universal’s costume department, headed by Vera Lyme, Connecticut, and other rustic areas West, were especially influential. Smith was cer- within striking distance of New York. Normal tainly aware of West’s contribution, noting that Love (or at least the footage remaining from the her suicide in a swimming pool was one sign unfinished project) also replaced the fast, among many that the Montez era was over. !% almost chaotic editing of Flaming Creatures with West’s designs for gowns worn by actresses both a more languorous pace. The film is a series of on and off screen used bold colouring and allur- tableaux vivants which focus the viewer’s atten- ing designs to counteract the darkening mood in tion even more on the glamour of his actors’ the United States in the late 1930s and ’40s as it costumes and poses. witnessed the fascist march towards power and Ron Rice’s colourful and sumptuously tex- war in Europe. West embraced the approach tured film Chumlum was influenced by Smith’s defined by Vogue magazine editor Edna Woolman Flaming Creatures and especially Normal Love, Chase in a talk on ‘Fashions in Wartime’ before which was being made at the time Rice began a Los Angeles luncheon attended by West and working on his film. Most of the scenes in other leading Hollywood costume designers in Chumlum were shot in Rice’s own loft apartment 1940. ‘War doesn’t stop fashion,’ Chase declared; and featured Smith, Montez and other members ‘it stimulates and creates styles. The men look of Smith’s cast who often appear in costume so attractive in their uniforms, the women want D to look more alluring than ever. Everyone thinks, well, if it’s a short life, it might as well be a merry one!’ !& Indeed, in Tay Garnett’s film Seven #" Jack Smith, ‘The Astrology of a Movie !' Vera West, ‘Hollywood Now Leading E Scorpio’ in Wait for Me at the Bottom of Style World’, Los Angeles Times, Sinners (1940) West covered Marlene Dietrich the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, 18 September 1940: B7. in ‘striking’ jewellery and feathers, although eds J Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell, !( Vera West, ‘Dress Moods to be Away Dietrich thought these accessories made her High Risk Books, 1997: 55. From War’, Los Angeles Times, look ‘junked up’. !' A year later, the designer !$ Jack Smith, ‘The Perfect Filmic 19 February 1941: B15. called for ‘[e]xtreme femininity of style … to off- Appositeness of Maria Montez’ in ibid: set the severity of war’. She favoured green, with 32. continued ‘interest shown in bright flame red, !# Jonas Mekas, ‘The Great Pasty Triumph’, and for softer tones, coral dust, beige and Film Culture, vol 29, Summer 1963: 6. bleached pink’. !( And she found inspiration in !! P Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The the East, arguing that Hollywood designers were American Avant-Garde, !"#$ – %&&&, 3rd D Jack Smith, Untitled (Mario Montez), ‘called upon to do a great deal of research for edn, Oxford University Press, 2002: 338. c 1964. Black and White Photograph. © E state of Jack Smith, courtesy period gowns or costumes typical of Bali or !% Smith (n 20) 27. Gladstone Gallery, New York. Java’; research they could use to produce ‘style !& ‘Conflict Pictured as Spur in Field E Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, of Style Creation’, Los Angeles Times, dir Josef von Sternberg, 1932. 26 January 1940: 10. !") Courtesy BFI. !"" F

influences which can be modernized and afford Arabian Nights and other Eastern fantasies, striking and original designs’. !" Noted for add- there are distinct differences in terms of how the ing exotic touches to her costumes, West hoped two forms of cinema deploy orientalism. Although she would influence fashion off-screen. Trying to Universal captured the orientalist, fairytale counteract the wartime gloom, she thought that visual style, its formulaic narratives tended to the times required a more creative approach to posit this style in opposition to everything H fashion. In her own costume designs for Universal . In contrast, Smith and his coterie Studios, she typically spiced up simple dress reclaimed orientalist fantasies in a much more designs with bold accessories such as hair, arm radical way – by immersing themselves in their and ankle pieces, glittering jewelled pins, allur- tableaux, by living them, with an ever-present ing multi-coloured headscarves, veils and elabo- sense of joyful absurdity. Becoming ostenta- rate turbans, !# all of which complemented the tiously and luxuriously dressed harem girls, spectacular sets designed by Russel A Gausman magicians, slaves, sheiks and other such arche- and Ira S Webb. types, they lingered in the imagined idyllic It is worth noting that while the settings, pleasures, in the eroticism (at times trans- costumes and characters of the experimental formed into something distinctly unerotic), in filmmakers align themselves with Universal’s the narcissism, violence, polygamy and same- commercial productions, in that they too evoke sex intimacy. They teased out these non-narra- the romanticised, pre-modern world of the tive moments of play and excess to create an

G

F Frame enlargements from Normal Love, dir Jack Smith, 1963. © E state of Jack Smith, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

G Jack Smith in Chumlum (frame enlargement), dir Ron Rice, 1964. Courtesy The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

H Mario Montez in Lupe (frame enlargements), dir Jose Rodriguez- Soltero, 1966. Courtesy The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. women of his generation, he learned to stretch it is the [collective] production of the play – the his clothing budget by sewing new and re-styling series of presentations, rehearsals, composition existing garments. Montez developed a discern- of the script … the performance gives a glimpse ing eye for cheap dresses and accoutrements that into a process of personal interactions within a could be transformed into the marvellous. By continuing community, everyone contributing 1967 he would boast: personally.’ !( Or, as Michael Moon puts it, this community of performers created a ‘voluptuous I don’t like cheap things. Of course, most of !) the time I design and sew my own costumes, fringe’ – the creative excess of which Flaming but when I go to thrift shops I don’t pick up Creatures and Chumlum document so brilliantly. just any old thing. The gown I bought the other But there were also individual pleasures to day, for example, was a Ceil Chapman, and it be found in this collective enterprise – those of was quite expensive. I insist on looking my becoming one’s own flaming creature. One major best in front of the camera. #& source of inspiration was of course Maria Montez. By the time of Jose Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe, After working hard to achieve success as a fash- I J Montez had established his own ‘costume ion model in New York, Dominican-born Montez house’, Montez-Creations, which made some of became an actress at Universal during the Second the costumes for the film and The Ridiculous World War, starring in a number of Technicolor imaginary location for their experiments in sub- name again to Mario Montez), a Spanish dancer Theatrical Company productions. His imagina- sand and sandal spectacles, which later made her jectivity and to break from the West which, they complete with a lace mantilla, fan, comb and tion knew no bounds, even if his budget did. In a gay icon. Her career declined after the war, and felt, oppressed their queer imagination. By doing flower in his mouth. 1969, he told Queen’s Quarterly that he spent in 1951 she drowned at the age of 39 after suffer- so, they complicated and suspended the East- In Normal Love, Smith expanded his cast of $ 50 a year on costumes and $20 on make-up. ing a heart attack while taking a hot bath with West divide in a way that Universal’s films couldn’t exotic creatures to include Mario Montez as the Charles Ludlam and other Ridiculous Theatrical reducing salts. Smith pays tribute to her screen and didn’t, in spite of their lush imagery. Mermaid, Beverly Grant as the Cobra Woman, Company members claimed that it was Mario magic in his article ‘The Perfect Filmic Although filmed in black and white, Flaming John Vaccaro as the White Bat, as Montez who taught them about make-up as well Appositeness of Maria Montez’, noting that it Creatures portrays a spectacular collection of the Mummy, and other members of his creative as how to use glitter and sequins to create the wasn’t her acting that was important: ‘flaming creatures’, many of whom were men circle as still more iconic creatures and charac- fantastic. !" Maria Montez was remarkable for the graceful- who posed, promenaded, put on lipstick, and ters from Hollywood’s fantastic universe. Like The space of pleasure referred to by Sontag ness of her gestures and movement. This grace- danced in the exotic costumes, make-up and Flaming Creatures, the film depends on a thrift- in her article was open to the community that fulness was a real process of moviemaking. Was ‘junked up’ accessories inspired by designs such store aesthetic. Its astonishing costumes cheaply came together to create these fantasy worlds. a delight for the eye – was a genuine thing about as West’s. Francis Francine played an elegant but creatively allow Smith’s cast to approximate They produced the sets together, performed that person – the acting was lousy but if some- Arabian woman, dressed in a turban, brocaded the look of Hollywood’s own creatures. together, and dressed and put on make-up thing genuine got on film why carp about acting – which HAS to be phony anyway – I’d RATHER Moorish dress and long white gloves. Joel Drawing on the same Hollywood imaginary, together, extending the pleasure in each activity HAVE atrocious acting … Her real concerns (her Markman played an alluring vampire with a Mario Montez created costumes for many of his that seemed as important as the finished work. conviction of beauty/her beauty) were the main blonde wig, arched eyebrows later film and theatrical roles using the vintage After his first visit to the rooftop set of Flaming concern – her acting had to be secondary … and a simple, slinky form-fitting dress. Rene clothing, fabrics, make-up and accessories he Creatures, Tony Conrad commented on his sur- M.M. dreamed she was effective, imagined she Rivera became Dolores Flores (later changing his found in thrift shops and dime stores. Like many prise ‘when it turned out that people took three acted, cared for nothing but her fantasy … Those who credit dreams became her fans. !* hours to put on their makeup’ and ‘when people took several more hours to put on their cos- Smith similarly inspired his actors, allowing tumes’. !' witnessed a similar scene them to become their own projected fantasies. #$ West (n 25) B7. !( Stefan Brecht, ‘Family of the f.p.: on the set of Smith’s Normal Love: ‘[P]reparations ‘The characters [in Flaming Creatures] were my Notes on the Theatre of the Ridiculous’, for every shooting were like a party – hours and friends’, Smith explained, ‘and my friends the #% Vera West, ‘War Brings Practicality The Drama Review, vol 13 no 1, into Fashion Picture’, Los Angeles Times, hours of people putting makeup on and getting characters.’ He was ‘[d]etermined to discover the Autumn 1968: 125. 17 September 1941: C6. into costumes and building sets.’ !# According to source which constituted his friends’ fantasies, !) Moon (n 2) 284. #& Montez cited in John Gruen, Markopoulos, Smith ‘spent hours, a whole night’ those unuttered, unintelligibly modulated images ‘The Underground’s M.M. – Mario !* Smith (n 20) 34–5. before shooting Normal Love, ‘arranging, chang- which existed in their minds’. !$ Montez’, New York / World Journal Tribune, !$ Markopoulos (n 12) 41. ing, shifting, replacing, placing objects, people, Mario Montez admired Maria, too, and emu- 22 January 1969: 29. cheese cloths, fabrics about a prefabricated moon lated her conviction in the parts she played. !% McColgen (n 14) 19. !" David Kaufman, Ridiculous! pool’. !! As Stefan Brecht commented on the com- Besides adopting her name for his stage persona, The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles munity that came together in The Ridiculous Mario Montez effused that ‘she does everything I Maria Montez, publicity photograph, Ludlam, Applause Theatre and Cinema Theatrical Company, ‘while the framework of ref- with such fire – nothing is pretended’. !% Joel 1941. © U niversal Pictures Co, Books, 2002: 66. courtesy George Eastman House erence of conventional theater experience is the Markman claimed that Mario Montez (to whom !' Hoberman (n 11) 26. Motion Picture Department Collection. individual presentation of the play, in this theater he referred as she) !# Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: J Lupe Velez, publicity photograph, 1930s. The Warhol ’!"s, Harper & R ow, 1980: 32. Courtesy George Eastman House Motion Picture Department Collection. !! Markopoulos (n 12) 44. !"! walks seemingly past the mirror but when Montez’s costumes and make-up. While Warhol’s exactly in line with the glass her head snaps film depicts the self-destruction of the star, PART III around as if magnetized and she faces herself; Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe celebrates the free- hypnotically she is drawn to the mirror. All previous concerns forgotten. She stands there dom and pleasure of Montez’s transformation for a moment, arranging her vision … She lives into a cherished actress, relishing his ascension in a world where she is actually the greatest out of ordinary life – a life constrained by politi- !$ and most desirable actress of all time. cal, moral and economic strictures – into an alternative space. Underground playwright Ronald Tavel noted that By creating an unfettered ‘cinema of attrac- Mario Montez ‘sometimes could approximate tions’, Smith, Montez and their coterie of friends [Maria’s] belief when he was in a movie scene appropriated Hollywood excess in order to con- that it was not a movie-shoot at all, but the real struct and perform their own utopian fantasies. thing’. #" Montez was sure that his performance Their glamour and gestures, generous visuals, transcended his ‘thrift store couture’ and his lack and vibrant music created spaces of pleasure for of formal training in dancing and acting. He was both audience and performers. They enabled a the Spanish dancer in Flaming Creatures and he group of impoverished filmmakers and actors to was Lupe in Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe. affirm their lives and their right to existence. Lupe, an homage to another Latino actress, Anything but abject, they became the alluringly the Mexican-born Lupe Velez, displayed Mario exotic, wild and transgressive Scheherazades Dressing Pink Narcissus Montez’s capacity for self-transformation more and Cobra Women. than any other film. Like Maria Montez, Velez’s B-movie career and tragic end led to her becom- ing a gay diva (Velez committed suicide in 1944 after becoming pregnant by a younger lover; she was unable to face having the baby out of wed- lock). Velez became a star in the late 1920s and a major focus of the tabloids due to her high- profile romance with Gary Cooper and subse- quent marriage to Johnny Weissmuller. At the end of her film career, she starred in the B-movie ‘Mexican Spitfire’ comedy series at RKO, playing a stereotyped fiery Spanish woman. Rodriguez-Soltero’s film stands in sharp contrast to another Lupe, also released in 1966, made by Andy Warhol and starring Edie Sedgwick alongside Billy Name. While Warhol focuses on the sad, lonely and sordid end of Velez’s life, Rodriguez-Soltero and Montez celebrate the Ryan Powell actress’s operatic-like successes and tragedies. They portray her as choosing and experiencing a life of excess, and even in her death they show her body and soul ascending to a saintly, inspira- tional place. In contrast to Warhol’s deadpan aesthetic, with its improvisational, long take structure, Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe is what Sontag would describe as ‘visually very gener- ous’. Filmed on Ektachrome-EF and printed on Kodachrome-II stock, it contains explosions of !$ Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol Vera West-like reds and greens and stunning and the Sixties, Pantheon, 2003: 54. superimpositions shot in the camera. Much of Watson also notes that Montez didn’t like the term drag and preferred instead the film’s lavishness and exuberance derives going into costume. from Rodriguez-Soltero’s loving attention to #" Ronald Tavel, ‘Notes on Screen Test II’, Summer 2001 (accessed from ronald-tavel.com, November 2010; !"# no longer available).

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