Flaming Creatures Poster

Hand-Painted Poster for Spectrum Between’s screening of Flaming Creatures (1963, dir. Jack Smith)
Created April 2026

I was asked by my friends Brendan and Shannon, who run the PDX-based experimental film programming organization Spectrum Between, to make the poster for their screening of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) on 16mm, alongside Ron Rice’s short Chumlum. With this screening taking place in the Clinton Street Theater, I took inspiration from the decor within that historic venue, which has other handpainted, oversized signs for various screenings and film festivals from throughout its tenure as one of the west coast’s longest operating theaters. I also felt like a hand-painted, three color design on brown butcher paper would befit the independent ethos of Jack Smith’s rebellious film and its origins playing the lofts and studios of 60s bohemian New York.

The main design elements of the poster are taken from the movie itself: the title font is a slightly thicker, more exaggerated version of the hand-drawn title screen itself, and the white silhouette is a large floral vase that is often seen as a background in Smith’s mise-en-scene (with some additional visual connotations as the explosive burst that Flaming Creatures had on experimental film and its relationship to the public and legal conceptions of censorship). Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up of the actors’ individual body parts, hence the cartoonish reels of film containing disembodied nipples, eyes, and lips.