Puce Moment

Puce Moment (1949)

This film resulted from the unfinished short film Puce Women. The film opens with a camera watching 1920s style flapper gowns being taken off a dress rack. The dresses are removed and danced off the rack to music. (The original soundtrack was Verdi opera music; in the 1960s, Anger re-released the film with a new psychedelic folk-rock soundtrack performed by Jonathan Halper.) A long-lashed woman, Yvonne Marquis, dresses in the purple puce gown and walks to her vanity to apply perfume. She lies on a chaise lounge which then begins to move around the room and eventually out to a patio. Borzois appear and she prepares to take them for a walk.

Date of release
1949-01-01
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (71)
Runtime
6m
Genres
Fantasy, Music
Director
Kenneth Anger
Collection
The Magick Lantern Cycle

Casting

Interesting facts

Puce Moment is a 1949 6-minute short film by Kenneth Anger.

Production

Filmed in 1949, Puce Moment resulted from the unfinished short film Puce Women. The original soundtrack was Verdi opera music; in 1970, Anger re-released the film with a new psychedelic folk-rock soundtrack performed by Jonathan Halper.

The gowns used were owned by Anger's grandmother, who had been a costume designer in the silent film era. The interior shots were filmed in the house of Samson De Brier, who later appeared in Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). The exterior shots of the patio were filmed at the house of Max Rapp, who was an orchestra contractor at Universal Pictures.

Anger attempts to recreate silent era style by using alternating camera speeds. Curtis Harrington was a cinematographer on the film.

The sequence where Marquis travels by chaise longue was inspired by paintings of Florine Stettheimer.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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