Notes on Camp

Warhol is a true documentarian, even though he only documents his friends, lovers, and random strangers. Through fiction (exaggerated fiction), we reach reality – which is often physical cruelty, approval-seeking, and sex. In Camp, Jack Smith's performance suddenly makes us uncomfortable about the film's irony. It is no longer a performance – it becomes scary, and we see fear in the faces of the other people. Smith exposes the movie, forces the camera to move with him, demands that the microphone captures his voice. Suddenly, the movie becomes real – it is not play-acting any more; or perhaps the movie has always been real, and Smith merely exposes that fact.

Jonas Mekas mentions that Smith's plays seem to be able to go on even without an audience. The same can be said of Warhol's films. The film exists independently of us. To go even further, the audience merely seems like an intrusion into the film's space. I can imagine Warhol's films playing to rows and rows of empty seats in a silent theater – the films exist like specters, ghostly presentations (not re-presentations) of the people in them. It makes me realize that, first and foremost, the responsibility of a film is to exist. How people (or the filmmaker) judge(s) it, how the audience sublates it into its own consciousness, how it is communicated into the world is secondary. The film is its own object, it is the radical Inhuman (even though it uses human characters as the wood to fuel its fire). When confronted with Warhol's stoic, indifferent images, the audience is confronted with infinity, that which is insurmountable.

That is the experience of a person watching them today, a person who has grown up without experiencing any of the idealism from the 60s. More so than any other filmmaker, Warhol's films are fossils that embalm time. In Camp, for example, there is the real time of the 'revue,' but also the weight of all the time that has passed since the event. One cannot watch the film without noticing its anachronism, without being confronted with mortality. The people in his films are resurrected each time they pass through the projector. Suddenly, they are youthful again; they are watching us as much as we are watching them.

And then we realize that we do not watch the images, it is the images that watch over us. Even when we leave the theater, we remember that the images are merely kept away, waiting for a time to be taken out, so that they can watch us again. We grow old, but the images remain the same. They are the ones who have seen all of history (the history that I have not seen) – they have seen the end of the Vietnam War, the rise of the Reagan-era, the Gulf War, 9/11, and now the 'war on terror' – and they are the ones who will outlive us. Like Odradek in that Kafka story, 'The Cares of a Family Man,' their mere existence makes us uncomfortable. We realize that we are the Other, we are going to live out our pathetic existence, and then die.

It is a strange sensation, then, to see the performers in Camp trying desperately to hold on to the camera. Just one more second of screen time, just one more frame to prove their humanity, their existence, their freedom, before the unfeeling machine randomly pans/zooms away from them, and they are again left out of the frame and into death.