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WE OPEN ON AN ITEM OF WOMEN'S CLOTHING spread across the screen like a theater curtain. The curtain rises to reveal another item of clothing, and another, and another. Dresses, shawls, negligees-silken, sequined, diaphanous-flutter past like a 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 a lot, shooting through my mind.
Things I 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,
I won't stop till I've understood the dark.
The lifting of the last veil, a glittering black dress, reveals the film's star, Yvonne Marquis, gazing coquettishly into the camera. She slips on the dress, then a pair of high heels, daubs herself with perfume and slinks languorously onto a plush sofa. Marquis is heavily made up and lushly lipsticked; her jet black hair is cropped in 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 in 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 in 1949, when he was nineteen; the track, by Jonathan Halper, was added in the 1970S.1 It concludes over Marquis descending the stairs of her Hollywood Hills home, a team of whippets in tow: "I am a hermit, my mind is not the same... and ecstasy's my game."
A silent film made in the late 19405, set in the Roaring '205, rereleased in the 19705 with a dope-rock soundtrack-an amalgamation of periods and styles strung together with a precocious camp sensibility and postmodern consciousness. Of course, associating camp and postmodernism, separately or in 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...