TALK

A Brief History of Camp in Queer Cinema (II): on Rosa von Praunheim
A curatorial introduction by ladestructiondesespacesvides
Age restriction: 16+

Rosa von Praunheim has turned bad taste into his most potent political weapon. Discover his cinema through eight film screenings and a lecture, in which camp – in papier-mâché, DIY, obscenity, drag or musicals – serves a radical queer emancipation. 

Closely linked to the history of drag and, before that, to gay subculture in modern England, camp is a parodic practice in which exaggeration and bad taste are understood as tactics of queer resistance. Camp distorts the aesthetic and moral conventions of mainstream culture to the extreme. It mocks Christian iconography, devalues portrayals of the family unit, and ridicules capitalism and consumer society. It makes itself the realm of the outcasts and the rejected and has a penchant for monstrous, carnivalesque or gothic themes, though it sometimes slips into forms of exoticisation or Orientalism.

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION

Anita - Tänze des Lasters
Die Bettwurst,
Berliner Bettwurst
Unsere Leichen leben noch
City of Lost Souls (Stadt der verlorenen Seelen)
Horror Vacui
Ein Virus kennt keine Moral
Überleben in New York