When Jack Smith’s 1962 – 63 film ‘Flaming Creatures’ was censored as obscene, it highlighted its own controversies amongst the moral codes of America’s mainstream. It exposed a crisis of law itself as obscenity laws struggled to be defined in a period of social change and gay liberation. In ‘The History of Sexuality’ , Michel Foucault argues that an attempt to repress sexuality results in institutions instead obsessing over it. Depictions of sexuality were its main cause for prosecution and I will examine how Smith’s techniques of concealment and un-concealment radically affected viewer’s ideologies - artists and politicians alike. In the context of Smith’s film then, a ‘moldy aesthetic’ shows a room of ruin and a mess of half naked bodies: if sexuality is a key to identity, then these values were interrogated in Flaming Creatures, which contributed to its controversy. …show more content…
This is against ‘official’ (hetro-normative) standards of sexual scandal. The Congressional Report released by the Senate during the investigation states: “It [is] … studded with sexual symbolisms…homosexuals dancing together and other disconnected erotic activity.” Therefore, certain spectators are not agents of pleasure when viewing the film; it is vulgar in the eyes of the Senate. This exacerbates the problem of desire and even a fear of sex – more specifically ones sexual orientation – with jump cuts between male and female body parts. This is in contrast to acknowledging perhaps, the power of sex, that the film demonstrates which in turn allows for acknowledgment of our existential fears and sense of