John Waters has always been a special kind of connoisseur. Watching him introduce two of his favorite films, James Wong’s Final Destination (2000) and Douglas Heyes’s Kitten with a Whip (1964), at New York’s Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archives, respectively, were personal cinematic highlights. His presence and presentation gave the screenings a context that’s often missing from cinema today. Instead of focusing on the macro, on hype and generalities, he embraced the films with an appreciation for single moments, glances, and thematic threads, like Ann-Margret’s energetic movement throughout Kitten with a Whip. His attention was on details that are often overlooked, and for how smart and warm and sexual and scary and bonkers cinema can be.

When you consider his own filmography, it isn’t surprising that Waters would watch movies this way. From early work like Eat Your Makeup (1968) and Pink Flamingos (1972) to gentler but no less transgressive fare like Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998), Waters’s films are rich with the same kind of playful details and references. A sequence in Polyester (1981) even goes so far as to show Divine’s character, Francine Fishpaw, reading a copy of Cahiers du cinéma, the esteemed French film magazine.