Put on your Sunday clothes and welcome to camp.

“The camera work is so bad, the lighting is awful, the technical work is terrible – but the people are fantastic”. – Andy Warhol’s advertisement of his 1965 film Camp, placed in The Village Voice on November 18. 

Outrageous! How come these curators dare to name Jacques Rivette the very same name used in contemporary writing for Donald Trump, Lady Gaga, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sex and the City? Camp. Camp! And what’s all about with this Warhol quote? There’s no bad editing in Beware of a Holy Whore, let alone the lightning in Jubilee. 

Put on your Sunday clothes and welcome to camp. Not to any kind of camp, but a specific episode of it, the sophisticated one of the ’70s, neither underground nor mainstream, filled with post-May ’68 deception and Stonewall bravado. As translators of this zeitgeist to cinema, Visconti was at its campest, Fassbinder was filming like crazy, and so was Werner Schroeter. Derek Jarman, Rosa von Praunheim, Ulrike Ottinger, Pedro Almodóvar, they all made their first films back then. It feels like Jack Smith in Technicolor, a Corman-Fellini tango.

 “I don’t know her.” For this essay is not about the life(s) of camp as a notion and even less so another list of camp figures. One must resist the temptations of encyclopedias. Curators cut cinema in pieces, we know that already. It’s one of the many montages that cinema has to endure. A cutting that eventually develops its own roots, becomes autonomous, as plants do. And the best part of a camp cutting is that it’s plastic, yet alive.

There's some accuracy in this otherwise silly metaphor of the plastic plant. First and foremost, plastic plants are camp. Not just visually, but conceptually as well – they encompass a magnificent obsession that is common to homosexuals, divas, and ultra-virile men (the holy trinity of camp), namely evergreen youth and strength. Unlike wax statues (which are camp in their own right), plastic plants are always the best versions of themselves; no yellowing, no root rot, in short, no decay. That’s due to how the very idea of a plastic plant makes the natural seem irrelevant. Only when faced with nature, say, a plastic coconut tree in the middle of an oak forest, the artifice is frontally exposed, failing in seriousness, becoming frivolous. That’s why camp can obtain so much intensity in cinema – a film has an economy, a running time, which can devote all its seconds to camp, artifice, exaggeration; while only glimpses of life can be camp. For when not intrinsically opposed to mundaneness, “real life”, camp can become a grand experience. It’s our mundane eyes that tend to belittle it. 

The queens left their castles. Now they’re living downtown or on the streets, in sumptuous mansions, hotels, restaurants, promiscuous cabarets, and local saloons, wherever the hottest cruising is going on. Rags and riches, they face the paradoxes of a zombie aristocracy. Playing with their BPM has been Fassbinder’s life project. Now, stating the obvious – every attempt to make a film about making a film has some campness in it; it’s an attempt to extinguish an inextinguishable fire, a hate letter to cinema written with outbursting love. In Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), a lavish mansion from the Spanish Riviera is about to become both the set and the hotel for an eclectic film crew. They await the director, angel-turned-gammler-turned-intellectual Jeff (Lou Castel), who is about to make a poorly budgeted movie based on Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution series. Needless to say, Eddie Constantine was Fassbinder’s pick for this role of a role. However, Constantine's presence is rather alien in the entire narrative. Besides hooking up with a Hanna (Hanna Schygulla, doing something between a cameo and a Marilyn Monroe impersonation), an actress whose slow and tipsy moves make her look like floating, we don’t see much of him. When we do, however, we don’t see Eddie Constantine getting ready to play Lemmy Caution, but how Constantine inhabits Caution and vice-versa. His old-fashion clothes and gallantry, stiff yet noble, and how Hanna turns from mocking him to desiring him, is camp in itself, a virtuoso representation of camp’s fascination for stardom and strictly controlled decay. But around him the waters are troubled. An angry producer buzzes around, as furious and loud as he can get – Fassbinder himself. When Jeff arrives, there’s no material to film. Hell on Earth. Jeff’s own anger seems irreconcilable. His power and nonchalance make the rest of the cast satellite around him. The way he talks, yells, smokes, looks, it’s no wonder that many of them want him – some had him, others will. Some simply stay away. As the story goes on, it’s getting clear that it's about an unmakeable film. Stuck between love affairs, jealousy, compromises, and inner turmoil, Jeff is becoming both the heartful hero and the ill-meaning villain of a melodrama filled with Hollywood mythology. Not an authentic melodrama but a detour of one. The message? “Whаt is this moviе businеss? Whеrе еvеryonе slееps with еvеryonе! Еvеryonе liеs! Do уou think it's normаl? Your moviе world...l think it stinks! l dеspisе it!” (Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine). And yet we adore it, ’cause underneath this turmoil, this self-flagellation of Fassbinder, there’s pathos. And if it stinks of pathos, let’s just say it’s camp odeur. 

Jeff mentions Marlene Dietrich at some point. His pipe dream is to sit with her in some bar in the desert. But what if Marlene Dietrich would happen to be there when you go out for a drink in Berlin. “She, a woman of great beauty, of antique grace and raphaelic harmony”, drunk as a fish in the pub you used to hang out in high school. Ice cold, polished, self-absorbed, and self-contained, living sumptuous porcelain. Oh, it’s not Marlene Dietrich, but a Ulrike Ottinger affectionate and ludic arthouse farce. And this is not today’s Berlin, but West Berlin of the ’70. Sure, we don’t know if the main character of Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (1979) is based in any way on Dietrich. What we can take for granted is that Ottinger is a queer connoisseur and that my brief description of Dietrich’s performance in her six movies made with von Sternberg in Hollywood has been used more or less with the very same words by hundreds of film critics ever since. One more time with feeling, I suggest that the nameless and voiceless heroine of Ticket of No Return (Tabea Blumenschein) is a humorous expansion of Dietrich’s most iconic moments in cinema, a witty and absurd answer to an unspoken “what if?”. This heroine with no past decides to get a one-way ticket to West Berlin and devote herself to what she loves most – drinking. Her look, that of a socialite caught in a continuous and most pretentious soirée, is alien to the mundane world of the lower class in which she bathes. She’s a hedonist of the most tasteful decadence. Naughtily rich, yet not spared the two cents that three prudish ladies, some sort of fairy bourgeois godmothers, constantly throw in her glass of cognac. These ladies, Social Question (Magdalena Montezuma), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Monika Von Cube), will comically bump into her from time to time. Much more an experiment than a narrative, Ottinger plays with situations, flamboyant vignettes in which the city and its easily perturbable rhythm become her stage. What interests her most (or towards what Ottinger guides us) are the outskirts – lesbian bars, drag queens (the heroine does some soft drag herself in the daytime), impromptu performances accompanied by a mysterious dwarf. She begins a somewhat ambiguous lesbian relationship with a homeless woman which becomes her protégé. Sure, we’re watching a satire, social cries and laughter translated into moving images. And the catalyst is a woman who doesn’t have a care in this world. Or does she? Ottinger’s larger-than-life character seems to have a feminist agenda inscribed to her hedonist lifestyle. Would the film be such a spectacle if a man would decide one morning to martyr himself in the name of drinking? Would he be on the first cover of the local newspaper? Ottinger’s heroine attacks taboos and conventions without a word. It’s a funny, bizarre, playful film, but also dead serious. Tabea Blumenschein’s costumes (both made and worn by her for this film) are far from serving looks only. 

Speaking of alien looks…Of course Queen Elizabeth I would want to see the future of England out of great love, for her country and herself, a nasty, unspoken curiosity of how she would go down in history. In Jubilee (1979), however, Derek Jarman does more than show her pleased (or disappointed?) by her lasting Virgin Queen nickname. An androgynous angel, Ariel, is invoked by Elisabeth’s (Jenny Runacre) court magician, Dr. John Dee (The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Richard O'Brien), to fulfill her wish. They (including a dwarf lady-in-waiting played by Helen Wellington-Lloyd) find themselves strolling around a 20^th century London, a funhouse of history where punk guerrilla queers guided by an aristocratic psycho lady (Jenny Runacre once again) who killed Queen Elizabeth II, Nazi officials, business oligarchs, and working-class extras are marching on the very thin ice of common sense that’s left. This punk showcase of glamour (with Christopher Hobbs as the costume and production designer) and music (Brian Eno,  Adam and the Ants, the Slits, among others) is a time capsule in which the fury, angst, and creative nonchalance of the British subcultural intelligentsia are being kept unaltered. But, no matter how eye-candy, this is not a celebration of punk, but more of a fictional study of extremes and paradoxes, punk being just one of its subjects. It’s neither a criticism, not even a critique. There’s no bad or wrong in Jarman’s film, and that’s because there’s no good or right. Just a cumulus of flaming creatures, burning with violent desire to rape all our understanding and linearity of history. Hot potatoes handled with silk gloves.  

It’s strange to end with Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), precisely because I see it as the very heart of this camp organism. Rivette himself is the misfit of this group of directors – nothing from his biography would recommend him as a man of excess, hedonism, or queerness. But what is camp if not the need to escape from the mundane? Rivette’s heroines do just that in his freewheeling adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Julie (Dominique Labourier) is a bohemian librarian who fancies magic books and a distant cousin she’s supposed to marry anytime soon. While reading outside, she catches a glimpse of a young woman in a tipsy rush, White Rabbit clumsiness. It’s Celine (Juliet Berto), a bohemian Christmas tree losing its pine needless under Julie’s worried but then amused sight. So Julie starts following Celine, willing to return her glasses. A somewhat hypnotic chase begins on the Parisian Montmartre streets and none of them is willing to give up. Down the rabbit hole. Finally, Celine wins, she's nowhere to be found. Julie finds her, however, but only the following day. No hard feelings, the game just began. Living a much more tumultuous life, Celine finds refuge in Julie’s apartment. She’s babbling about a previous job of hers, nannying a sick girl for a somewhat dubious family. She recalls the address – 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes, now a decrepit house. Both of them would separately visit the house the following days, disappearing for some time and going on with this tiggy play. During these on and off days, one would replace the other on special events – Celine disguises herself as Julie to meet the childhood sweetheart and eventually dump him, and Julie does a cabaret show that Celine was supposed to do. What follows is a fragmentary recollection of what was going on in the haunted house – a second narrative, out of their world and time, some kind of a soap opera about two aristocratic sisters (Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier), each of them eager to put her hands of their deceased sister’s husband (producer Barbet Schroeder). What stands in their way is their niece, who their sister wanted to protect by asking her husband not to ever remarry after she dies. The nanny, played by either Celine and Julie, has on and off interferences in this tensed narrative by flirting with the man. Animated by the mere pleasure of completing the plot, but also by the noble mission of stopping the murder of the little girl, Celine and Julie decide to step into the soap opera without disturbing it too much. Rivette goes on with this blending extravaganza to shape very passionate and meaningful statements on cinema and spectatorship, even if loosely articulated. But the idea is there – riding the wave of artifice and pathos, of that too-much and too-large for your life to accommodate, is all fun and games. But diving in it, let its waters supersaturate your skin, that's a pleasure no one should resist.