Susan Sontag: Notes on Camp: 1964: The Partisan Review
You thought it (camp) meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping. … You can call [it] Low Camp…
Susan Sontag: The Partisan Review 1964
High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art … High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …
Susan Sontag: The Partisan Review 1964
DIRECTOR: James Whale
BOTTOM LINE: Director James Whale’s masterpiece is as close to Susan Sontag’s definition of high camp as the movies can deliver. Elsa Lanchester’s star is born in the title role, sporting the most creative “do” in cinema history. Gay actor Ernest Thesiger, whose portrait was sketched by no less than John Singer Sargent in 1911, gives his most famous performance as Dr. Frankenstein’s gay mentor, Dr. Pretorious.
Having arrived in Hollywood with R. C. Sherriff’s “Journey’s End,” Whale was signed by “Uncle” Carl Laemmle to a five-year contract at Universal Studios. The result was one of the great periods in Universal’s history, with Whale producing such classics as Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, and The Bride of Frankenstein. Unfortunately, his adaptation of “The Road Back ” (1937), Erich Maria Remarque’s follow-up to “All Quiet on the Western Front,” was not a success, and by 1941, his film career was over.
The premise was suggested by “Frankenstein,” the 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Music: Franz Waxman
Universal Pictures
