Pride @ Pickford

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Welcome to Summer Camp!

Unfortunately, this camp isn’t easy to locate, but those who know will know how to find it. “Camp” is an exaggerated, over-the-top, often-in-bad-taste style that’s hard to define. According to Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay “Notes On ‘Camp,’” it’s a particular mode of aesthetic appreciation that celebrates the artificial, the frivolous, and the extravagant. Those of us who are queer or otherwise on the margins, with our fine-tuned skills at observing mainstream culture, are particularly adept at knowing it when we see it.

As Sontag points out, camp originated as a sensibility among “homosexuals,” which is itself such a wonderfully dated and campy term. Along with being a “private code” and “badge of identity” for sexual outsiders, camp is also genderqueer, or as Sontag put it, “androgynous.” Camp puts everything in ironic quotation marks, especially “femininity.” It loves a double entendre. It’s theatrical, flamboyant, and rococo: camp is a Tiffany lamp. It’s also sentimental about the past and melodramatic. Camp is failed seriousness. Camp is “too much.” Camp is best when it’s naive, because camp that tries to be camp isn’t satisfying. Unless of course it’s all-in and fully committed, but nothing in between! Camp is “instant character”: it’s the actor who can never disappear into a role but will always remain irrepressibly themself. Camp is Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Camp is Gina Gershon and Megan Fox.

Ultimately, camp is not judgmental: it wants to laugh at the world and have a good time. So grab a tree branch and some marshmallows and join us, fellow camper, as we bask in the glow of five magnificent films, all with fabulous scripts and scenery-chewing performances, spanning the history of camp cinema from 1950 to 2009.

~Co-curators/series speakers, Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans

Speakers

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS/CO-CURATORS

Chris E. Vargas is a video maker and interdisciplinary artist. He earned his MFA from the Art Practice department at Berkeley in 2011. He is the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the culture and political landscape. His recent book an extension of MOTHA, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects (2023, co-edited with Christina Linden and David Evans Frantz) brings together a wide-ranging selection of artworks and artifacts that highlight the under-recognized histories of trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming communities.

Greg Youmans is associate professor of English and film and media studies at Western Washington University. His essays on queer and experimental film have appeared in Camera Obscura, e-flux, Los Angeles Review of Books, Millennium Film Journal, and the Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema among other publications. His first book was a study of the groundbreaking 1977 documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (dir. Mariposa Film Group), and he is currently at work on a second that is tentatively entitled “Something New Under the Sun: Bay Area Queer Filmmaking Across the 1970s.”

PRIDE MONTH AT PFC: SUMMER CAMP! — THURSDAYS IN JUNE

Content

Transcendent Love Stories
The first series, Transcendent Love Stories, celebrates four of the most critically acclaimed, visually sumptuous, and agonizingly beautiful romances of the 21st century. Carol, Brokeback Mountain, Portrait of a Lady On Fire and Moonlight. Come enjoy these ravishing films with us on the first four Thursdays in June!

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Visual Language of Trans Cinema
The second series, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Visual Language of Trans Cinema, explores camouflaged representation within the history of transgender film with the films, Under the Skin and The Matrix. For Under the Skin, on the final Thursday in June, we are honored to welcome Willow Maclay, for a full introduction. Maclay is a film essayist and co-author of the upcoming book Corpses, Fools and Monsters: An Examination of the Trans Film Image set to be released in 2024 by Repeater Books. She has written for outlets such as The Village Voice, Roger Ebert, MUBI and Polygon. And for The Matrix, playing late night Saturday June 17, we're pleased to have Pickford projectionist, Boone Farrell, offering an introduction and sharing their insights.

Showtimes

Showtimes Civil War | 3:15PM, 5:45PM, 8:30PM Housekeeping for Beginners | 3:30PM, 6:00PM, 8:15PM

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Site Note

watch_later
We open 30 minutes before the first showtime of the day.

accessible
All theaters are ADA accessible with wheelchair seating.

hearing
Closed captioning and assistive listening devices are available at the box office.

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Pickford Film Center

1318 Bay St
Bellingham, WA 98225

Office | 360.647.1300
Movie line | 360.738.0735

info@pickfordfilmcenter.org

Mailing Address
PO Box 2521
Bellingham, WA 98227

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