Puce Moment

A six-minute fragment of a film designed to be much longer, Puce Moment follows an archetypal silent movie star as she luxuriates through her opulent surroundings. Beautifully shot in color, the film is rich with fabrics, jewelry and antique Hollywood exotica. Excellent original psychedelic movie score added in the 1960s. Echoes of this work may be felt in Anger's later films of the 60s, particularly "Kustom" and the opening sequence of "Scorpio Rising".

Because of the psychedelic music I didn't believe this was from 1949, but that is probably added a decade or more later. In combination with the pictures it creates a very special experience that I watched over five times (its only six minutes) to let it endure. How the music and the text relates to the images is another thing, its either hippie or pure hedonistic or (strangely) both. What it creates in feeling of reminisce and nostalgia over past times is what makes this so special.

All we see is a diva woman enjoying herself by herself, as a hermit as the music suggests, looking at her garments, smelling her perfumes or out on the terrace with her four greyhounds. She is so self indulgent that she looks high.

Anger. She looks through the wardrobe, not knowing what fits her style. The surreal orchestra plays as she finds the one that is the

best without a doubt-the black dress. It is beautiful and sparkling.

She places it on herself and walks around. Once she has had enough she

rests-awaking next morning to find herself in a distraught position outside. The dogs are lined up, she takes them for a walk-leaving her southern Californian house in mourning.

This is indeed one of Anger's best. It depicts his childhood fascinations with movie-stars and bizarre situations.

I recommend this film to every fan of avant garde or follower of a subculture/art.

I watched this film and saw that the dress alleged to be puce was actually blue. Not bluish puce--just plain blue blue. Puce is defined as a reddish purplish brown. The dress was nowhere near that color. Why did they take a blue dress and call it puce?

I don't know if there is too much to this short by Kenneth Anger, but I also don't know if Anger wants us to think there's anything deeper past the facade he presents: a bunch of dresses are shown one by one, floating like ghosts, and then the woman is trying the dresses on, puts on her pointed fashionable shoes, and then is taken along while lying back on a couch through light and dark until she's on a roof.

I wish I knew what the word 'Puce' meant before watching the film (looking it up in French it means 'flea', so is it related to fleas somehow, or a flea circus, I don't know). It doesn't seem to have much to relate to this - maybe because dogs appear near the end who are leading along the woman - but that's fine, I suppose.

I didn't watch this first among the Anger films in his collection, and I think Scorpio Rising, Rabbit's Moon and even the hallucinogenic Lucifer Rising offer more meat on the experimental bones than this. It's also hard to judge it as its own thing as Anger went back to re-dub the original version he shot and he put Jonathan Harper folk songs over it, which... was the wisest decision he made as it turns this into something that is out of time, as it's clothes from the silent film era (via his grandmother who was a designer), an actress and setting and film stock that's late 1940's (in color! and not bad stock at that), and music from the 60's.

This ends up being a keen music video, and of course it shows how vital Anger was with putting images to music. But apart from that it's not something that yells "watch this over and over" (unless, of course, you love the songs beyond measure or the clothes or whatnot). Maybe if Anger had had the money to do what he wanted it'd be something more than these fragments stitched together.