Puce Modern Moment: Camp, Postmodernism, and the Films of Kenneth Anger
2006; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoWE OPEN ON AN ITEM OF WOMEN'S CLOTHING spread across the screen like theater curtain. The curtain rises to reveal another item of clothing, and another, and another. Dresses, shawls, negligees-silken, sequined, diaphanous-flutter past like disembodied dance of the seven veils. On the sound track, harsh, whining electric-guitar music clashes with the soft, sensual image, as does the snarling Mick Jagger-like vocal: I've learned lot, shooting through my mind. Things never guessed at before. And so I've decided to live my life alone. I'm going to learn to fly the clouds. I'm going to learn to fly the wind, won't stop till I've understood the dark. The lifting of the last veil, glittering black dress, reveals the film's star, Yvonne Marquis, gazing coquettishly into the camera. She slips on the dress, then pair of high heels, daubs herself with perfume and slinks languorously onto plush sofa. Marquis is heavily made up and lushly lipsticked; her jet black hair is cropped the Dutch-boy, flapper fashion of the 19205. Indeed, her androgynously seductive mien is patterned after the Colleen Moore/Clara Bow/Barbara La Marr type of that period (see fig. 1). As the notes on the video box tell us, this six-minute film, titled Puce Moment, is a lavishly colored evocation of the Hollywood now gone, shown through an afternoon the milieu of the 19205 star(Anger, Kenneth vol. 3). The notes, like the film, are by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who shot and edited the film 1949, when he was nineteen; the track, by Jonathan Halper, was added the 1970S.1 It concludes over Marquis descending the stairs of her Hollywood Hills home, team of whippets tow: I am hermit, my mind is not the same... and ecstasy's my game. silent film made the late 19405, set the Roaring '205, rereleased the 19705 with dope-rock soundtrack-an amalgamation of periods and styles strung together with precocious sensibility and postmodern consciousness. Of course, associating and postmodernism, separately or conjunction, with Anger's work is hardly startling. What is revelatory is the link between the two modes that his work brings into stark relief-a link that has heretofore gone unexplored. In mobilizing the films of Kenneth Anger to examine the historical, aesthetic, and ideological connections between and postmodernism, hope to broaden and enrich our understanding of these complex and still controversial cultural practices. Camping Out: Brief History of the Gay Style If the elements Puce Moment are excessive to the point of parody-epicene sexuality, garish apparel, bittersweet homage to Hollywood, tongue-in-cheek title (puce as color and on pussy)-why do term Anger's use of them precocious? Camp's derivation has been located as early as sixteenth-century England, where camping described young men who wore women's costumes in play (Rogers 40). David Bergman finds the earliest records of gay subcultural connection to The London Spy's expose, 1709, of camp ceremonies: A particular Gang of Wretches... degenerate from all Masculine Deportment or Manly exercise that they fancy themselves women (Strategic Camp 93). In 1928, Mae West, herself to become icon, noted the stage directions to her The Pleasure Man: Boys (female impersonators) camp-enter through (central fancy door). When character the is asked if anyone heard scream, she responds, No, you heard them queens next door campin' (qtd. Robertson 160-61). Far from inventing camp, then, Anger appears to have tapped centuries-old tradition. To grasp how Anger's representation of Puce Momentwas original, even revolutionary, one must turn to Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay Notes on Camp. Sontag traces camp's lineage from Italian mannerist painting and rococo architecture through more overt manifestations late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century literature and music, emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau Movement. …
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