I wanted to do a perfume post as I am so obsessed with certain scents. In my research which always starts somewhere & inevitably ends somewhere totally different I started looking at films by film maker & author Kenneth Anger. I found out about him years ago from his Hollywood Babylon books which I have & love & then discovered his films. So anyway this is my favourite Kenneth Anger short film called Puce Moment from 1949 and basically is Anger’s least angry film. It is short, fast & oh so beautiful which is why I wanted to share it with you. It is short because of his budget & at the time he simply couldn’t afford more film. It is a tribute to all the Hollywood golden age stars that he (and you & I) are so obsessed by. We see gorgeous dresses flying off a rack as if invisible glamorous ghosts are wearing them. Reminds me a little of Beetlejuice when the newly dead couple are trying to scare the new house owners, sorry am going off on a tangent. Anger’s grandma was a costume designer for the silent movies and all those dresses were from her. The music was originally classical and in the 60’s he changed it & used a track by trippy folky Jonathan Halper which I think is just perfection. This however is to Roxy Music’s In Every Dream Home a Heartache. There is a surreal performance by unkown actress Yvonne Marquis (isn’t she just divine?!) applying perfume. See, I did sort of manage to talk about perfume.
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