Underground film-maker with a bent for the tawdry and camp
If ever there were an exemplar of Susan Sontag's definitions of camp, it would be the work of the underground film-maker George Kuchar, who has died of prostate cancer aged 69. Although Kuchar was unknown to Sontag at the time she wrote Notes on Camp (1964), she could have been referring to his no-budget pictures with her general description of camp as being "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. The ultimate camp statement is it's good because it's awful."
Around the time of Sontag's seminal essay, there emerged a series of influential "outrageous" camp films such as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), which depicted a transvestite orgy, Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963) and Kenneth Anger's gay biker movie...
If ever there were an exemplar of Susan Sontag's definitions of camp, it would be the work of the underground film-maker George Kuchar, who has died of prostate cancer aged 69. Although Kuchar was unknown to Sontag at the time she wrote Notes on Camp (1964), she could have been referring to his no-budget pictures with her general description of camp as being "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. The ultimate camp statement is it's good because it's awful."
Around the time of Sontag's seminal essay, there emerged a series of influential "outrageous" camp films such as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), which depicted a transvestite orgy, Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963) and Kenneth Anger's gay biker movie...
- 10/19/2011
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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