How Kenneth Anger Created Camp Cinema with His Short Film, ‘Puce Moment’

On a black screen, in pink letters emitting specks of turquoise, the words “a film by ANGER” emerge into view. Not “a film by KENNETH ANGER” — he has chosen to omit his first name for a far showier yet enigmatic mononym. It’s an unconventional choice, a self-assignment of renown, yet few in mainstream circles would recognize it at the time (at least not in the way they would recognize “a film by LANG” or “a film by CURTIZ”). Still, with its imposing text and lurid color palette, it’s almost as if Anger expects his viewers to know who he is — to readily accept that implication of stardom in which merely a surname suffices.

This preoccupation with celebrity, artifice, and a garish visual style define 1949’s Puce Moment, Kenneth Anger’s underrated keystone of early American avant-garde cinema. Compared to his first major film Fireworks (1947), or his 1963 magnum opus Scorpio Rising, it’s a lesser-seen work. Moreover, long before Susan Sontag wrote the term “camp” in her 1964 Partisan Review essay “Notes on Camp”, it set the bar for exactly what that aesthetic would evoke.

What is “camp”? It has been the subject of extensive discourse with 2019’s Met Gala. It saw myriad celebrities line the red carpet in outfits ranging from Old Hollywood-glamorous to utterly unclassifiable. Defined as “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” (“What Does It Mean to Be Camp?” Joobin Bekhrad, BBC, 7 May 2019), camp is recognized nowadays as the style of such cult classics as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Valley of the Dolls (1967), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Mommie Dearest (1981), and musical artists like Cher (think of her headline-making Bob Mackie gown and feathered headpiece at the 1986 Oscars) and Lady Gaga (look no further than her 2010 VMA dress made entirely of raw beef).

By traditional standards of taste and style, camp is exaggerated and subversive, characterized by a fascination with artifice and artistic extremity. It takes everything from fashion trends to gender roles to beauty standards and distorts and reimagines them.

Camp sometimes happens by accident. Indeed, in the case of Valley of the Dolls, its director’s attempts at creating a compelling melodrama were transmuted by histrionic writing and over-the-top performances, turning the film into an accidental comedy better remembered for its Travilla gowns, hammy dialogue, and wig-snatching theatrics than its meditation on women in show business contending with drug addiction. Yet, critics and audiences have found in Valley of the Dolls’ unintentional campiness new and more vital meaning over a half-century later.

The film’s overstated mid-1960s aesthetic offers a lens through which sexism, human sexuality, women’s experiences, and the celebrity machine of the time can be explored. As Glenn Kenny noted for The Criterion Collection in 2016: “Dolls shows an unselfconscious inkling of feminist consciousness that’s genuinely bracing.”

Camp’s kitschy theatricality mixed with a (knowing or unknowing) rejection of dominant cultural standards (knowing, in the case of a film such as John Waters’ 1972 queer trash epic Pink Flamingos, or unknowing in films like Valley of the Dolls) has made it a widely embraced aesthetic in the gay community. Many gay people have found in camp’s gaudy and provocative nature an extravagant haven lightyears away from the oppressions and limitations of a heteronormative world.

In the 2006 documentary Gotta Get off This Merry-Go-Round: Sex, Dolls, And Show-tunes, gay entertainment columnist Ted Casablanca puts it best. “It’s the bigger than life stuff that we often tend to go for, because our ordinary lives are often so, if we let heterosexual society get away with it, painful… unhappy. So what do we do? We’re gonna escape into the smuttiest, tackiest, biggest, over-the-top, bejeweled stuff we can find”.

As an openly gay man whose body of work contains similar experimentations (and engagement with celebrity, performativity, and queer identity) as the work of Andy Warhol and John Waters, it’s no surprise that Kenneth Anger dreamt up a film like Puce Moment. It is also worth noting that Anger was making work like Puce Moment decades before Warhol or Waters picked up a camera.

In the postwar years, Kenneth Anger established himself as one of the leading avant-garde cineastes of his time (along with artists such as Maya Deren) by subverting conventional standards of narrative filmmaking as promulgated by major studios and engaging with cinema as a fine art form. Whereas Deren imbued her work with a surreal quality inspired by dance, movement, and dreams (1943’s Meshes of the Afternoon, 1944’s At Land, and 1959’s The Very Eye of Night being the most potent demonstrations), Anger imbued his work with a surreal quality drawn from queer fantasies — and realities.

Here, the distinction between Deren and Anger becomes clear. While both created art that was groundbreaking, Anger’s (in pre-Stonewall America) was illegal. Notably, his first major work, Fireworks (1947) — a filmic rendering of a homoerotic and sadomasochistic wet dream — landed film distributor and exhibitor Raymond Rohauer, who screened Fireworks at the Coronet Theatre on October 11, 1957, on obscenity charges. The case later went to the California Supreme Court. 

Puce Moment, which Kenneth Anger made two years after Fireworks, proves a different kind of dream. As in Fireworks, one won’t find handsome sailors or the sparks of Roman candles as metaphoric ejaculate. By comparison, the events of this six-minute film are rather mundane on paper. A young woman (played by Anger’s cousin Yvonne Marquis) dresses in a flapper gown and applies perfume at her vanity before a chaise lounge carries her out to her patio, whereupon she decides to take her Borzois for a walk.

Kenneth Anger eschews a conventional narrative in Puce Moment (whichm apparentlym was conceived as part of a larger suite of glamor- and fashion-focused shorts about women in Hollywood that never came to fruition, titled Puce Women). He instead centers beauty, artifice, and materiality and allows these elements to propel his film. The first indication of Anger’s infusion of camp is Puce Moment’s prologue, prior to Marquis’ introduction.

An apparently sentient series of flapper dresses quiver and shake in front of the camera, sliding down a clothing rack before fudging cinematographer Curtis Harrington’s lens and disappearing. (Like Anger, Harrington was a gay man and a major figure in the West Coast avant-garde film movement. He eventually transitioned to directing B-movies in the 1960s). Anger vomits glamor into the viewer’s face, fetishizing a material world of silk, velvet, cotton, and glitter. His cinematic universe is tactile, corporeal, and overwhelming.

After Marquis is introduced, the simple action of slipping a dress over her head is conveyed through numerous double exposures and frames that seem to dissolve as soon as they appear — many of which only feature the garb’s sequined fabric saturating the screen in a gaudy tremor. This banal everyday act is transformed into an overblown material odyssey. Meanwhile Marquis presents mannequin-like, smiling from ear to ear and looking glamorous to the point of uncanny valley. In Anger’s world, roles are reversed. What is artificial (the flapper dresses on the clothing rack) appears animated, and what is already animated (Marquis herself) appears artificial.

Like an oil painting, Marquis’ glossy lips and mile-long lashes seem tangible, as though Anger has transformed his celluloid into a textured canvas. Later, Marquis inexplicably twitches across a patterned carpet to a vanity covered in perfume bottles that look like glass origami figures. The viewer sees Anger’s star in full regalia for the first time, albeit in soft focus. (This inconsistency of cinematographic precision lends the film an almost patchwork quality that only adds to its kitschiness). 

Posing next to her mirror like a storefront mannequin, Marquis sprays scents out of a giant emerald container, the subtlety and antiquity of her vanity’s ivory frame clashing against her scintillating dress and the red and green drapes that cascade behind her. That very clash — of colors, fabrics, and styles — speaks to Anger’s vision. His is a visual language, equal parts lush and disorienting, that might not appear in a major Hollywood feature. In the context of camp and the underground cinema of the time, it’s aesthetically liberating.

There is also liberation in the context of gender and performance. As the protagonist drapes herself across a chaise lounge covered in purple-and-cream stripes — the same chaise lounge that inexplicably moves on its own, eventually bringing her outside to her sun-soaked patio — she initially registers as an object of heterosexual male desire. Marquis’ visage here appears no different than those of such Hollywood superstars as Myrna Loy or Hedy Lamarr. (Her role in this film seems to comment on and even satirize the glamor treatment of leading ladies like Loy and Lamarr).

Yet, Anger’s infusion of a campy sensibility via imprecise editing, a frenetic frame rate, and a candy-coated color palette where neutrals simply cannot exist — where overstimulation manifests in hues and near-tangible textures — suffuses the film with a queer, hyper-feminine, even anarchic vibe. He transcends objectification or exploitation to achieve something newfound and sublime.

Despite living in California and imbuing his films with visual references to the star-making machinery of Tinseltown, Kenneth Anger’s work is not so much about or a part of Hollywood as it is distinctly adjacent — even antithetical — to it. Especially in Puce Moment, he refracts the stardust of the hegemonic studio system through his POV as a gay industry outsider, resulting in a kind of cinematic transfiguration.

Marquis embodies that transfiguration, imbuing her performance with a sense of autonomy and independence — even glee — as she vamps for the screen and relishes her glamor and femininity (without a leading man affirming or supplementing her presence). Anger’s short could be classified as an early feminist work in this way, one that culminates in an aura of deliverance as an all-dolled-up Marquis is driven out of the shadowy boudoir and into the light.

One cannot write about Puce Moment and its campy aesthetic without addressing a significant alteration it underwent more than 20 years following its initial incarnation. In 1970, Kenneth Anger replaced its original soundtrack (consisting of Verdi opera music) with a psychedelic folk rock piece by Jonathan Halper. During the film’s opening flapper gown sequence, Halper’s synthesizer nearly overpowers Anger’s visuals before shifting to a despondent guitar when Marquis is first introduced.

The artist, whose lugubrious tenor evokes a kind of alternate-universe Lou Reed, sings lyrics like “so I’ve decided to leave my old life behind, I don’t need it anymore…I’m gonna learn to climb the wind”. Puce Moment thereby inhabits the countercultural ambiance of the period in which Halper’s song was recorded.

On initial viewing, the combination makes for a jarring juxtaposition, eyes immersed in one milieu and ears in another. A change in song proves equally jarring as Marquis poses before her vanity, and Halper shifts to a softer tune consisting of the lyrics, “I am a hermit”. By conventional standards of narrative and style, these visuals — characterized by an overripe Old Hollywood aesthetic yet underscored by late 1960s acid rock — register as mismatched.

By Puce Moment‘s climax it becomes apparent how effectively the two work together. Anger’s initial exaggeration of fashion, makeup, and feminine beauty dissolves into his heroine lounging confidently on her chaise, “hermitted” from the real world (echoing Halper’s lyrics “I am a hermit”), her own agent in her own reality. In his article “Puce Modern Moment: Camp, Postmodernism, and the Films of Kenneth Anger” (published in the Winter 2006 issue of the Journal of Film and Video), film scholar Vincent Brooks even credits Anger’s “amalgamation of periods and styles” due to Puce Moment being “a silent film made in the late 1940s, set in the Roaring ‘20s [and] rereleased in the 1970s with a dope-rock soundtrack” as lending the film “a precocious camp sensibility and postmodern consciousness.”

With the latter-day critical reappraisal of films like Valley of the Dolls and Pink Flamingos, “camp” is now in vogue, further proven by this year’s Met Gala which thrust the term into the mainstream like never before. An aesthetic that in its overstated and unapologetic (and often satirical) nature questions and transcends arbitrary limitations of “taste”, camp has become something to celebrate and aspire to.

For it we can thank an artist like Kenneth Anger and a work like Puce Moment. In it, he has taken filmic curios like Constance Bennett’s 1937 short “Daily Beauty Rituals: Photographed in Cinecolor!” and turned them inside out. He has forecasted the histrionic hallmarks of Douglas Sirk’s sumptuous Technicolor melodramas. He has warped and lampooned the trends and styles of high-brow fashion plates and pin-up posters that both influenced and were propagated by the Hollywood studio system.

With Marquis, he has predicted Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s indelible countenance in Rocky Horror Picture Show and blazed the trail for Barbara Parkins’ outrageous “Gillian Girl” from Valley of the Dolls. He has made kinship with Lady Gaga’s gold lashes and voluminous fuschia dress of the 2019 Met Gala red carpet… 70 years prior.

Kenneth Anger was making camp before it was ever a fad. In Puce Moment, he created a glitzy, gaudy, absurd, subversive, queer-coded, proto-feminist space at a time when making such a space could be damning… when there was no space at all.