OFF Series

“Notes on ‘Camp'” is the title of Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking seminal 1964 essay. The essay created a sensation of sorts by introducing the concept of Camp and its plethora of cultural connotations to mainstream audiences.

Sontag defines “camp” as a modern phenomenon and sensitivity epitomized by its “love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration” and of the stylized. The “camp,” she contends, is esoteric – a sort of “private code, a badge of identity […], among small urban cliques.” According to Sontag, “Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content.”¹

Camp films are self-conscious, extravagant, ironic, iconoclastically anti-bourgeois and amoral celebrations of bad taste. The evening program will include three Camp-related avant-garde films from the 1950s and 1960s that are infused with “camp” spirit.

Two years after the publication of Sontag’s essay, American underground filmmaker George Kuchar (1942-2011) released his “Hold Me While I’m Naked” (1966). With its radicalized artificial filmic approach, overacting, superfluous and lush colorfulness and tawdry sets and customs, this film would become one of the defining texts of Camp.

A year earlier, George Kuchar’s twin brother, Mike, made the low-budget classical campy sci-fi “Sins of the Fleshapoids”, which will also be screened during the evening. The deliberately untenable plot of the movie describes a revolt staged by androids, a million years in the future, against their human masters, who have become too lazy. The film is considered a major influence on cult director John Waters’ camp aesthetics.

In addition, the underground masterpiece “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), a forerunner of camp, will also be screened. The Kuchar brothers were influenced tremendously by that film and by its director, avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In turn, Anger himself was greatly inspired by the philosophy of English occultist Aleister Crowley while making his visual psychedelic symphony, in which Lord Shiva plays host to various mythological creatures in his pleasure dome.