Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen is now at BFI Southbank until 30 April. We hold this exclusive dialogue with Will, BFI National Archive curator and co-programmer.
· Trash cinema wears “bad taste” as a badge of honour, but where do you personally draw the line between deliberate transgression and something that simply fails?
I think the line between those states lies very much in the eye of the beholder and is even deliberately blurred in the case of some filmmakers, like say Jack Smith (NORMAL LOVE). But what does failure mean? If a film gets made and is shown on the big screen, then its successful from the perspective of the creative act. If something fails according to expectations of mainstream Hollywood cinema then instead it is doing something different.
· Many of these films were born in marginal, DIY spaces, so does bringing them into an institution like the BFI risk softening their original anarchic spirit?
Sometimes it can feel like it but in many cases the provocative punch of these works still strikes the optic nerve and in a comfortable, nice cinema may even have more impact – something dissonant can happen. These works were always straddling the underground and the acceptance of more established environments – it almost feels part of their DNA. John Waters’ PINK FLAMINGOS played at Cannes, for instance.
· The season spans from the 1930s to the 1990s, so what surprised you most about how the definition of “trash” has evolved or perhaps stubbornly refused to?
Trash feels like a time specific cinema which we indulge in now slightly retroactively. We experience it in the present when we view trash films but at the time of production they were creating the concept and working it out. There’s something transcendent about pasting marginal lives and activities up on the cinema screen, at huge scale. So that limits the time scope to a pre-home video age, arguably. In terms of surprise, I can still sometimes be astonished at how strong and transgressive early cinema can be.
· Films like Pink Flamingos still shock today, so do you think modern audiences are harder to scandalise or have we simply changed what we are scandalised by?
Some films once considered shocking now feel like historic artefacts, their production aesthetics more clearly linking them to a certain time. But some films, as noted, still pack a punch, for sure. Naturally, we’re scandalised by different things now however cinema was once the domain of shock and scandal, with calls for films to be banned, but this happen incredibly rarely now. The channels of communications are so much broader. It changes from the specific to the general – we talk about types of content now or platforms, rarely a particular piece of moving image material. However, sit certain people down with certain films and they would be freaked out. But that’s the domain of in the individual rather than a kind of mass hysteria as was the case with the video nasties. There’s a lot to say about this question!
· There is a strong thread of queer identity and outsider voices running through the programme, so how central is trash cinema to preserving histories that mainstream film ignored or erased?
It’s essential. Certain identities only lived in these spaces and in certain respects these works act as a kind of metaphysical documentary record, preserving faces, attitudes and creative endeavours. The people in these works are heroes to a great many people.
· With the pristine 35mm restoration of Plan 9 from Outer Space, is there a delicious irony in giving one of the so called worst films ever made the archival reverence usually reserved for masterpieces?
Strictly speaking it’s not a restoration but a new print made from original elements. We didn’t intervene or recreate anything but I take your point! To be able to make a new print is actually what’s of interest, what is says about the films we preserve in the BFI National Archive, in certain respects. The collection is enormous and encompasses all types of film. And for the record, Plan 9 from Outer Space is a good film with all sort of curious, extraordinary things going on in it. Making a new print means people get to see it as it was originally intended – on film, in a cinema. The cult of this film has been made through the video age, arguably, but that only increases the reason to put it back on film. People can see it as it was intended – and looking really good! I think Ed Wood always knew his films would endure and receive some larger appreciation later in life. So many are about resurrection – and we’re resurrecting Plan 9 on celluloid. Ed Wood has the last laugh.