Short Films of Kenneth Anger: Forever Hollywood Cemetery Screens Rabbit’s Moon

This past Sunday night, Cinespia screened several short films of Kenneth Anger at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. I can think of few better ways to see these films, any of them really, than under the stars in a cemetery with silhouetted palms swooping overhead like gigantic Seussian creations.

Among my favorites is a shorter work whose final edit was made by Anger in 1979. Not touched since the previous (second) edit from 1972, Anger pared down the songs to Andy Arthurs “It Came in the Night,” rather than the original mini-soundtrack that featured several 60’s pop and doo-wop songs that loosely toyed with the themes of night and moonlight.

1972 Edit of Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon, Part 1

The real beauty of Anger’s films, and what always strikes me about them when I’ve had the opportunity to see several in one sitting, is the focus on the relationship between tactility and visuality in one’s notion of what is beautiful. With the fetish, the object of one’s desire is considered to be outside of the normal conventions of human sexuality. And because of this potential for an object outside of the self to be the subject of one’s fetish, the depersonalized element perhaps requires multiple modes of understanding and information retrieval. We must more thoroughly investigate to know and consume that which is so distinctly both attractive and other.

Anger uses the vernacular of both the fetish and the fetishized subculture to explore how one’s relationship to an object of desire might come to be known and maybe more importantly, how it might come to be expressed. Rabbit’s Moon isn’t the best example of this idea of tactility and the visual mediating one’s fetishistic exploration, but it’s exceptionally gorgeous film in terms of both color and its stuttering style of editing/camera work, with multiple frames removed to approximate something like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

1972 Edit of Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon, Part 2

After some research, I found out that apparently, “Anger shot the film in a warehouse in Paris during 1950. According to the Anger’s commentary on the DVD, three students of Marcel Marceau’s school of mime perform in the film; they enact traditional figures from the Commedia dell’Arte (Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine).”

1979 Edit of Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon

In 1979, Anger re-edited the film for the third time; in this version, he included the Andy Arthurs song, “It Came in the Night,” a livelier romp that entirely skews one’s read of the work. If you can, I suggest you watch the two videos with the sound off, while playing this song’s volume up in another window or tab of your browser. Play it twice, through both parts of the film.

Although Andy Arthurs wrote the song, his British band “A Raincoat” released the single in 1975.

Post Copyright 2009 Matty Byloos