Underground films premiered months after first being screened privately

Evidence

Flaming Creatures broke into print in mid-April when Mekas wrote in his column that Smith had just completed “a great movie.” Flaming Creatures “is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies. I saw it privately and there is little hope that Smith’s movie will ever reach the movie theater screens.” Not two weeks later and accompanied by a second version of Conrad’s taped soundtrack, a further revised Flaming Creatures received its theatrical premiere, midnight, April 29, 1963, at the Bleecker Street Cinema on a bill with Blonde Cobra. (Over the next ten months, the two films would frequently be paired.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 427

Categorization

• XREF: The rapid revision-and-rerelease cycle (‘further revised’) shows works circulating unfinished — an important condition of scene density and collaboration.