babuscio on camp and the passage of time
The time factor is also crucial to one’s appreciation of camp theatricality. A good deal of the screen acting which only recently appeared quite ‘natural’ will, in the goodness of time, doubtless become camp for its high degree of stylisation (that is, if it is not already camp). Examples: the ‘method’ acting of Rod Steiger and early Brando; so, too, the charming, ‘dated’ styles of George Arliss, Luise Rainer or Miriam Hopkins. Similarly, a number of personalities from the silent cinema, once revered for their sexual allure, now seem, in the seventies, fairly fantastic: Theda Bara and Pola Negri. Men, as David Thompson has observed, have always had an insecure hold on the camera, so that male sex appeal, e.g. in the case of Rudolph Valentino, vanished much more quickly than did the sway exerted by women. Finding such stars camp is not to mock them, however. It is more a way of poking fun at the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and sexual identifications which our society uses to oppress its women and repress its men--including those on screen. This is not to say that those who appreciate the camp in such stars must, ipso facto, be politically ‘aware’; often, they are not. The response is mainly instinctive; there is something of the shock of recognition in it--the idea of seeing on screen the absurdity of those roles that each of us is urged to play with such a deadly seriousness.
from “Camp and the gay sensibility” by Jack Babuscio, p. 46