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

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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 1960s Queer abstract, material and spiritual, that inhabits things but also runs through them and puts Underground Film 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 Flaming Creatures (1963) in The Nation, ential 1963 manifesto Metaphors on Vision, the shortly after it had been confiscated by the police experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage 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 Normal Love (1963), Ron Rice’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, Anthology Film Archives, 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, Drag 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 Manhattan. 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’.
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