Cinema Can Do Camp: The Devil’s Cleavage

From the 50s onwards, George Kuchar (1942–2011) shot 8mm Hollywood tributes with his brother Mike as the “Kuchar Brothers”. These films form a sort of off kilter offshoot of both the work of the New American Cinema and renowned King of Trash John Waters. THE DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE was his second feature film. Shot in San Francisco on a microbudget and with considerable invention, the film was shown at the Berlinale Forum in 1979 and brings together everything that give Kuchar the reputation of being one of the founders of camp cinema: the idiosyncratic, story of nurse Ginger (Ainsley Pryor), who flees the big city and her useless husband to look for happiness and passion in the rural idyll of Oklahoma is a crazy, tender declaration of queer love to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli that is shot through with a streak of offbeat humor. Gaudy make up, homemade looking sets and special effects, dialogues bursting with puns and innuendo – a magnum opus of the American underground. (uz)