Selected topics in the study of film.

In this course, we’ll investigate what we mean when we say that something is “so bad it’s good.” Two aesthetic concepts of the modern age, “kitsch” and “camp,” will help us think through this central question. What is “kitsch?” Often used as an all-purpose pejorative for the “bad taste” of the masses, for years kitsch was seldom explicitly defined, but nearly always derided. But in the postmodern era, “kitsch” took on new life, as artists, filmmakers, and designers consciously appropriated these “bad objects” of the past, remixing and revaluing yesterday’s detritus. “Camp,” on the other hand, is, in the words of Susan Sontag, “in the eye of the beholder.” Sometimes defined as an interpretive style, camp is sensibility which perceives an irony between a thing and its context. In some ways, “camp” is what allows us to appreciate “kitsch” in a pleasurably complex and ironic way. In this course, we will consider the logics and histories of taste that contribute to various and changing definitions of kitsch and camp, as well as the ways that kitsch and camp manifest in cinema, including B-movie horror, musicals, the imaginaries of Route 66 and Las Vegas, queer avant-garde of filmmaking practices, as in the work of Kenneth Anger and John Waters, as well as in Japanese kawaii and American “tiki culture.” We will also investigate the political and colonial histories that underlie these aesthetics. Thanks to a collaboration with the Willis Wonderland Foundation, students will use the “living kitsch archive” that was the home of famed songwriter Allee Willis, a bubble-gum pink house in Valley Village in Los Angeles.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills