Polyester

John Waters not only has created his own cinematic world, a distorted version of his native Baltimore, but he has also created his own visual language, a deliberate assault on the conventions of arthouse film. Non-professional actors recite or scream their lines, filmed in technicolour gaudiness, in plots that seem sketched on a greasy napkin at a road-side diner. Famously crass, coarse, and kitsch, there is a political refusal of ‘proper’ in all his work. Polyester makes those politics more obvious, but not more comfortable, in this tale about an oppressed housewife (played by Waters’ collaborator ‘Divine’, aka Harris Glenn Milstead), who learns the hard way that being a wife and mother is less important than being herself.

INTRO. SEASON 9: OFF THE WALL!
Queer films have been thrilling and enlightening audiences since the prehistory of cinema (two women kissing in 1888 in Muibridge’s Plate 444, or two men dancing together in 1895 in Dickson’s Experimental Sound Film), and will continue to do so in the future of cinema (see Ximena Cuevas’ experimental lesbian videoart, or Yobert Yang’s cottaging simulation videogame The Tearoom, of 2017). Queer-friendly and LGBTQ filmmakers have made movies in every genre: romance, documentary, thriller, fantasy, drama, adventure, horror, musical. AND they have also made movies that are impossible to classify… Because they don’t want to be classified. Because they rather invent their own genres. Because they want to use a secret code. Because they don’t care if they’re seen as camp, mad, fab, or ‘gas’. The word “queer” originally meant ‘weird’. Join us as we celebrate the weird and wonderful and forgotten heritage of unclassifiable queer films. Unique propositions, with just one thing in common: a touch of divine madness.

© Dublin Film Qlub 2018
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