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2 items from 2011

19 October 2011 10:26 AM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

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 »

- Ronald Bergan

19 March 2011 7:49 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Above: Zoulikha Bouabdellah's Al Attlal (Ruines), left, and Pierre Léon's À la barbe d'Ivan, right.

Nicole Brenez has curated two programs of new work from the French avant-garde for this year’s Rendezvous with French Cinema 2011 in New York; below she has offered her program notes in French. Program one (on Saturday) concentrates on filmmakers reappropriating images; program two (Sunday) is the new feature by Ange Leccia, Nuit bleue. Below, I’ve translated Brenez’s extended appreciation of Leccia and Nuit bleue; as usual, I’ve tried to stay faithful to the sound and rhythm of the original where possible.  Beneath the translated extract you'll find the full article by Ms. Brenez in its original French. —David Phelps

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…Although Ange Leccia has also practiced re-appropriating images (especially Jean Luc-Godard’s) in his installations and his films, Nuit bleuetakes up a different aesthetic vein, one rich with a long tradition of the French avant-garde. »

2 items from 2011