Offscreen: a cinematic celebration of cult

If you, as a film buff, are aiming for as much street credibility as juvenile delinquent Johnny Depp in Cry-Baby, you’d better book tickets for these films from Offscreen’s Camp & Trash programme right now.




PINK FLAMINGOS

John Waters’s breakthrough film from 1972 and a milestone in underground trash cinema in which the then 26-year-old DIY filmmaker frontally tackled our notions of good taste with, successively, chicken sex, cannibalism, a singing anus, and the repulsive dog shit finale. The obese transvestite Divine became an instant camp icon. Screening and Q&A with Waters, chaired by trash specialist Jack Stevenson.

POLYESTER

John Waters goes Douglas Sirk and lets Divine shine as a frustrated housewife with an ultra-sensitive sense of smell that is taxed by a flatulent, adulterous husband, a glue-sniffing foot fetishist, and an all too enthusiastic skunk. Screening in Odorama, so including the original scratch and sniff cards because “smelling is believing”!

BLOOD FEAST

In 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis wrote film history with what is now considered the very first gore film. Blood Feast may look quite clumsy, but it was ground-breaking in its graphic depiction of violence with hacked off limbs, ripped out organs, and litres of squirting blood. An instant drive-in hit in rural America, the picture acquired cult status when it popped up in urban grindhouse cinemas in the 1980s and was embraced as camp by hip audiences, with John Waters in the vanguard.

CRY-BABY

This over-the-top homage to the juvenile delinquency films of the 1950s is our favourite from Waters’s post-Divine period. Meet the Squares, or bourgeois goody-goodies, and the Drapes, the coolest street gang ever, led by the ultimate greaser Johnny Depp, alias Cry-Baby, who with obvious glee torpedoes his tame TV teen idol image in his first starring role in a film. All to the tones of the hot-blooded rockabilly soundtrack.

FLASH GORDON

Probably the most entertaining camp feast in this festival. This super production based on the famous comic strip series was intended to be the ultimate space opera, but on its release in 1980, it became a flop of intergalactic proportions. It is more appreciated nowadays as a guilty pleasure, due to its ridiculous dialogues, insane special effects, the tight buns of the title hero, and the bombastic soundtrack by Queen. Flash!!! A-haaaa!

THE KUCHAR BROS

Twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar are less famous among the general public than Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, but they were at least as important as pioneers of American underground cinema. Starting in the mid-1960s, they made highly personal, no-budget short films that juggled with comic book and Hollywood conventions. Curator Jack Stevenson has made two compilations including their best-known film Sins of the Fleshapoids, one of John Waters’s favourites.

MARTHA COLBURN

Yet again this year, Offscreen is presenting an unusual animated film director. For the past twenty years, Baltimore-based Martha Colburn has been making short, trashy animated films on Super 8 and 16 mm in a jerky, clippings style that combines coloured found footage with cut-out figures from magazines against hand-painted scenery. The result is playful, unpolished, and subversive. Colburn is coming to the festival and will introduce her work.



CAMP AND TRASH FOR DUMMIES
The sixth edition of the Offscreen Film Festival once again underscores the importance of contextualisation for its film screenings. Not only will all the films be introduced, there are also lectures by specialists, meetings with filmmakers like Martha Colburn and guest of honour John Waters, and even a veritable conference devoted to this edition’s central theme: trash and camp.
In his book Land of a Thousand Balconies. Discoveries and Confessions of a B-Movie Archaeologist, curator and Offscreen Festival guest Jack Stevenson discusses camp and trash extensively. According to Stevenson, the essence of trash is a celebration of the cheap, offensive, and disposable. Trash cinema is low-budget cinema in which no effort is made to conceal technical limitations, but rather they are highlighted, as in the work of the Kuchar brothers or the early films of John Waters. Camp is more complex. There are various kinds of camp, such as high or low camp, pure or deliberate camp, but basically this aesthetic focuses on the glorification of exaggeration, the vulgar, and the artificial. Camp relates directly to the viewer’s perspective, and whether he/she has a sense of irony and double entendre. Viewed through camp lenses, productions that were intended to be serious, such as the clumsy gore film Blood Feast or the megalomaniacal space opera Flash Gordon take on a whole new dimension and may be valued as grandiose failures. What trash and camp have in common is that filmmakers like the Kuchars or John Waters use both aesthetics to rebel against socio-cultural norms and our notions of good taste.
Would you like to know more? Then head to Cinema RITS on 8 March where national and international experts are coming to share their insights. Or you can ask Jack Stevenson himself, who will be at the festival with his Trash from Hell Show, to introduce the films by the Kuchar brothers, and to interview John Waters.

Divine Trash: Conference on Camp & Trash Cinema, 8/3, 10.00, Cinema RITS

Offscreen Film Festival • 6 > 24/3, Cinéma Nova, Cinematek, Bozar & Cinema Rits, www.offscreen.be


> READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WATERS