Category: Camp
July 26, 2023 / Arthouse

Anita: Tänze des Lasters (1987) AKA Anita: Dances of Vice

On a dirty grey street in Berlin, a crowd gathers round an eccentric old woman who is performing a strip-tease. Dragged off to a psychiatric hospital, she demands cocaine instead of thorazine, tries to seduce everyone in sight, and insists that she is the legendary dancer Anita Berber, darling of the decadent ’20s. Suddenly, in true Wizard of Oz style, the film departs from monochrome reality into the colour-drenched world of the woman’s fantasies, a wildly exaggerated evocation of Weimar Berlin filmed in full-blown expressionist style.

WATCH HERE<span class="entry-title-primary">Anita: Tänze des Lasters (1987)</span> <span class="entry-subtitle">AKA Anita: Dances of Vice</span>
December 9, 2022 / Arthouse

Pink Narcissus (1971)

The work of artist and photographer James Bidgood, Pink Narcissus is a breathtaking and outrageous erotic poem focusing on the daydreams of a beautiful boy prostitute who, from the seclusion of his ultra-kitsch apartment, conceives a series of interlinked narcissistic fantasies populated by matadors, dancing boys, slaves and leather-clad bikers. 

WATCH HEREPink Narcissus (1971)
January 21, 2022 / Camp

Flaming Creatures (1963)

Flaming Creatures is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Jack Smith’s deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom.

WATCH HEREFlaming Creatures (1963)
December 15, 2021 / Arthouse

Heute nacht oder nie (1972) AKA Tonight or Never

Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places. A troupe of actors (including cult cabaret artist Ingrid Caven) are hired to entertain the guests, performing fragments from the “cultural scrap heap”: GONE WITH THE WIND, Madame Bovary, Tennessee Williams, Swan Lake. The decadent proceedings take on a dangerous edge when the actors incite the servants to revolt against their masters-but is the Revolution also part of the act?

WATCH HERE<span class="entry-title-primary">Heute nacht oder nie (1972)</span> <span class="entry-subtitle">AKA Tonight or Never</span>
April 19, 2021 / Camp

No President (1967)

Jack Smith’s third feature film was originally titled “The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie by the Love Bandit,” in reaction to the 1968 Presidential Campaign. Willkie was a liberal Republican who ran against FDR in the 1940’s. It mixes B&W footage of Smith’s creatures with old campaign footage of Willkie. The climax of the work appears to be the “auctioning” of the presidential candidate at the convention.

WATCH HERENo President (1967)
October 4, 2018 / Camp

Desperate Remedies (1993)

In the imaginary 19th-century town of Hope, draper Dorothea Brooks is desperate to save her sister from the clutches of opium, sex and the dastardly Fraser. She begs hunky migrant Lawrence Hayes to help; but complications ensue.

WATCH HEREDesperate Remedies (1993)