Eaux d´artifice

Colour, 16 mm
USA, 1953, 13 min
Section: Midnight Screenings

Synopsis

Set to the music of Vivaldi, a mysterious costumed figure romps through Italy’s ravishing Tivoli Fountains in the moonlight. Perhaps the most abstract and purely beautiful of all his films, it was shot in black-and-white and printed through a blue filter.

About the director

Kenneth Anger (b. 1930, Santa Monica, USA) is one of the greatest and most notorious living American avant-garde filmmakers. Drawn to cinema, glamour and scandal early on – his grandmother worked in Hollywood as a dresser and he knew Shirley Temple from school dances – he made his first film of note, Fireworks (1947), at the age of 17. It set the mold for his later oeuvre, silent films of intense sensual imagery combined with mesmerizing musical soundtracks. A follower of necromancer Aleister Crowley, Anger describes his lifework as being “Magick”. His films may be seen as cinematic manifestations of his occult practices, appealing directly to the subconscious mind. Anger also wrote Hollywood Babylon. His filmography includes Puce Moment (1949), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Rabbit’s Moon (1972) and Lucifer Rising (1980).