Puce Moment

Kenneth Anger is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time, and this is a film I've been wanting to watch for quite some time. After watching it, I enjoyed it. Although not as great as other Anger films like "Scorpio Rising", which has become one of my all time favorite films, it is still a great, little, experimental short.

It has no plot, like most of avant garde cinema, but it is a series of images, which, unlike other avant garde films, are all connected, involving the same one character, who, mainly just goes through a bunch of her dresses. Other stuff happens as well, but it is mainly a woman going through her dresses.

What is so good about that? Well, Anger's imagery and style make the film very visually interesting, and the soundtrack helps the film as well. It is ahead of it's time, and a great short film that you should probably have enough time to watch.

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.

I probably shouldn't have reviewed this. I had absolutely no interest in the subject matter or the story. So I am not going to dis it but I didn't see anything that was eye popping. I suppose the fact that it was made in 1949 had something to do with its inclusion at this time.

For me, that is Kenneth Anger is less impressive works, as most of Anger's shorts, the folk-rock music added in the 1960s is amazing. However, that short doesn't tell anything subliminal or interesting. That being said, I liked the intro sequence as well as the color palette.

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.