Notes On ‘Camp’ On DVD
I wonder what the late Susan Sontag, who introduced the term “camp” into the mainstream with her famous 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” would make of camp’s arrival as a DVD marketing tool. Warner Home Video has announced the June 26 release of the four-volume “Cult Camp Classics Collection” — apparently the first time that a major Hollywood studio has applied the term “camp” to its product, albeit modified with “cult” and “classics.” Among the 12 “trashy treasures that will bring hours of kitchy fun,” as the WHV press release describes them, are “Queen of Outer Space” starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, “Caged” with Oscar nominees Eleanor Parker and Hope Emerson, “Trog” starring Joan Crawford, “The Prodigal” with Lana Turner and two Dana Andrews pictures, “Hot Rods to Hell” and “Zero Hero!” (the latter, from a story by Arthur “Airport” Hailey, was remade as “Airplane!”). Sontag listed a number of “campy” films in her essay — which defined camp as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” But these days we wouldn’t refer to “Kong Kong,” “All About Eve,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Trouble in Paradise” and the Busby Berkeley movies as camp, at least not as a synonym for “trashy treasures.” We’d call them art.

