The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, February 23, 2007

The Digital Underground: 2/23/07

Kenneth Anger, arguably the most famous experimental filmmaker in America, finally has a collection of his shorts available on DVD through Fantomas Films. The five dialogue-free short films collected on this first installment are light on narrative, instead focusing on the subconscious power of images. And the images they capture are as difficult to describe as they are to forget.

The first film on the set, Anger's earliest surviving film, is Fireworks (1947), a crude, 16 minute short that Anger says was inspired by a nightmare. It deals explicitly with homosexuality and with what most sources strangely refer to as sado-masochism," but I interpret as gay-bashing, which must have been an even greater fear for gay men in 1947 than it is today. Either way, the violence is intense and graphic, and its impact suffers little from the cheap effects.

After the raw violence of Fireworks, the rest of these films settle into a heightened sense of Hollywood glamor and beauty. Although these films don't have the explicitly gay imagery of Fireworks, they present a very specifically gay aesthetic, a distillation of glamor into fetishistic images. The opening sequence of Puce Moment (1949), where a series of increasingly fabulous fabrics are jiggled before the camera, is pure fetish porn for lovers of high fashion, but it's also an undiluted dose of potent beauty. Similarly, Anger doesn't seem to view the fountains in Eauxd'Artifice (1953) as spurting phallic symbols, but as objects of beauty, and as his camera focuses on the dance of the sparkling water, it works as a pure piece of moving photography.

My favorite of these shorts is Rabbit's Moon (1970), a dreamy piece set in an artificial forest that resembles a stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and scored to doo-wop songs like "There's a Moon Out Tonight." The shimmery, silver lighting gives it the look of some childhood dream you can't quite remember.

The centerpiece of the disk is The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a 30-minute pageant of occult imagery inspired by Anger's fascination with Aleister Crowley. Consisting of Anger's friends and associates dressed up as mythological figures, the film displays a psychedelic beauty that would have seemed unremarkable in the late 60's, but must have been startling in 1954. Again, there are fetishistic shots of jewelry and exotic fabrics, and the brilliant photography resembles that of the Powell and Pressburger technicolor extravaganzas (although even they never managed to get Deborah Kerr or Moira Shearer's hair to show up with the fiery intensity of Marjorie Cameron's here).

Anger provides a commentary for each film. He's not the most talkative commentator, and for the most part just identifies actors and locations, but that's for the best, as these imagist films are well-suited to individual interpretation. There are also demonstrations of the restoration work done, and some deleted scenes from Rabbit's Moon. The disc comes with a 48-page booklet featuring an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and the Crowley-inspired packaging is quite beautiful. Watching these films for the first time, I was astonished by how much of Anger's style seems familiar from being co-opted by later directors. The way certain scenes of Pink Flamingos are scored to pop music, the overwhelming multiple-exposure images of the ballet in The Elephant Man, the clawing zombie hands in Night of the Living Dead, all seem to have originated from the mind of Anger. I've never heard him list Anger as an influence, but it seems obvious to me that David Bowie must have seen these films before creating his Ziggy Stardust persona. If that character wasn't based on the striking vision of Marjorie Cameron in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, then Todd Haynes' version of Bowie in The Velvet Goldmine certainly was.

These films, of course, were made at a time when explicit homosexuality could never have appeared in a Hollywood movie. Gay themes were pushed to the far fringes of all art forms, and an experimental, independent filmmaker like Anger would be the only type of person who could include these themes in his films. When you hear religious conservatives talk about the good old days, this is what they mean. They seem to believe this situation created less gay people, but I believe it just created more weird people. How many young homosexuals would have grown up to be conservative businesspeople and homemakers if they had been able to find conservative gay role models? Instead, they found Kenneth Anger, William S. Burroughs and The Velvet Underground, and never looked back.