Pink Flamingos: John Waters and the Art of Bad Taste

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

There is a photograph John Waters likes to reproduce: Divine, three hundred pounds of drag menace in a skin-tight red dress, cheekbones drawn up towards the temples in that famous shark’s-fin makeup, strolling down a Baltimore street as though she owned the pavement and everyone on it. That image is the whole film in miniature. Pink Flamingos, shot in 1972 for something close to ten thousand dollars, is a work of enormous confidence dressed in the cheapest clothes it could find. Half a century on, its reputation rests almost entirely on its final ninety seconds, which is a shame, because the ninety minutes before it are a far stranger and more disciplined piece of filmmaking than its status as a gross-out dare suggests.

Transgressive Cinema - vo.rs

Pink Flamingos: John Waters and the Art of Bad Taste