Flaming Creatures in Warming Waters
A new commissioned essay by So Mayer
Roseate spoonbills sweep their distinctive flattened beaks from side to side, seeking crustacea in the warm shallow waters of the Florida Everglades. On the soundtrack, an announcer at Kennedy Space Center describes the final steps in a rocket launch. ‘The ton of water absorbs and prevents the sound hitting the rocket and reverberating… back onto the rocket.’ NASA’s sound suppression system through water deluge requires 450,000 litres per launch, at a time when roseate spoonbill populations in Florida are falling due to human-made climate change, including poor water management in the Everglades.
Malic Amalya’s short films are spoonbilled, sweeping their idiosyncratically-shaped attention through the shallow, warming waters of American white settler colonialism. Montaging found materials from nature documentaries with observational footage of beings (the American tourist included) in their environments, and high camp performances that restage, remake and revision Jack Smith’s films, Amalya’s spoonbilled cinema sweeps us into place.
First Breath on Mars (2025), the final film in both Alchemy’s programme and Amalya’s Mythographies trilogy, brings together the emblematic bird of Florida with the state’s equally emblematic grafted-on architecture of space flight: launchers, domes, armatures, and a dramatic contrail. Amalya’s films move side-to-side between such traces: material constructions and ghostly marks. In RUN! (2019), the first of the Mythographies trilogy, there is the ‘classic mushroom cloud’ (as stated on a photoboard in the Los Alamos visitor park), seen on film and in photographs remediated by Amalya’s camera, and there is the strange trace – at once shed insect carapace and asemic inscription – left in the sand by the gas mask that Amalya wears as the alien leather-daddy creature who ascends a dune.
There is little distance between the body and the world in Amalya’s films. His production company is named Vitreous Chamber after the largest chamber of the eye, the part behind the lens that sustains the eyeball’s spherical shape and in doing so, shapes our capacity for vision. It took until 2024 for ophthalmologists to realise that the volume of the vitreous chamber varies significantly between individuals, and this correlates with myopia and hyperopia. The chamber is filled with vitreous fluid: more fluid correlates to myopia, just as flooding correlates to spoonbill numbers falling. The shape of our eye is the shape of our world.
Short films, like shallow waters dense with crustacea, offer a way for us to process the world without being flooded. Amalya’s vitreous chambers absorb the sonic boom of settler colonial history, nuclear war, transphobia and their attendant oppressions and censorships. Legendary short film Flaming Creatures (1963) made and broke Jack Smith’s career: achieving a level of cult fame, it drew attention from the NYPD, who arrested Kenneth Jacobs, Florence Karpf and Jonas Mekas for screening the film at the Bowery Theater in 1964, resulting in their convictions, and rendering the film unscreenable.
Leather Graves (2025), the opening film in Alchemy’s programme, revisits the iconography of Smith’s definitional queer experimental film, mixing his vision with that of Bob’s drag kiss-in funeral in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). Rather than whooping it up in a New York studio, the kinky queers of Amalya’s film make out with each other and lick jelly from plastic flowers in a cemetery. Reversing the title of Leo Bersani’s ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, possibly the most iconic essay in queer studies, Amalya asserts that, instead, the grave can be a ‘pink orchard’ or ‘pink end’, to quote two of the deliciously erotic puns he montages from engraved letters on the headstones. ‘Composting is hot’, as Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens assert in their ecosexual cinema.
Reinvention can only happen by admitting we live on stolen land, by polluted water, and using the tools we have to enter it and filter it, then return it. The kiss-in is not just any cemetery, but that of Salem, Massachusetts; that Salem, of the witch trials, on the land of the Pawtucket Confederacy and their settlement at Naumkeag, an Eastern Algonquian place name that means fishing ground or eel-land. Instead of the powder keg of Eurowestern rocket-launch culture, propose Amalya’s films, the Naumkeag: a place to be patient, to wait, to catch sustainably, and to sustain yourself.
In Living Lessons in the Museum of Order (2023), Amalya revisits a defining image of white America’s denaturing: SeaWorld and its captive orca. SeaWorld footage is intercut with tourists at Alcatraz, the nearby prison island. Orca follow the trainers’ instructions; tourists follow the audio tour. In among the audio there erupts a reading from Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s novel There There, whose title is not consolation (‘there, there’), but a rebuke to Gertrude Stein’s naïve dismissal of Oakland, where she grew up, as ‘there’s no there there’. The there there is the heart of Amalya’s body of work. What if we kissed plastic flowers in a colonial cemetery? It’s no consolation, but it is a liberating imperative to connect, here at the pink end of the living world.
So Mayer’s most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a manifesto and memoir on language and power. So is a bookseller at the Maktaba at Ibraaz, a collaboration between Burley Fisher Books and the Palestine Festival of Literature, and a member of queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes.
