Saw it again the other day for the fourth time with years interspersed in between, and again the exuberance was there: tell me, how Kenneth Anger does it?
Something of the effortlessness of a great master is here; being in his late seventies when he made this, it is a lesson in casualness and one hell of a crisp build-up this viewer has ever witnessed:
In retrospect, one can sense some structure into this: divided in four sections, this can be read like the introduction to cinema, then the talkies, then shift to its creepy, glorious, puppet cultural stature, which comes in full gears in the last part:
when the Jeff Koons-like mirrored Mickeys appear on screen accompanied by The Proclaimers' great "Joyful Kilmarnock Blues", this transcends memorabilia, nostalgia, jots of creepiness and mock atmosphere, the collecting thrust and becomes a display of verve that is unfair to appropriate as retro.
This is what movies are for, and Kenneth Anger knows it and plays with it in this great ten minutes pop poem of his.
Thank you.
Something of the effortlessness of a great master is here; being in his late seventies when he made this, it is a lesson in casualness and one hell of a crisp build-up this viewer has ever witnessed:
In retrospect, one can sense some structure into this: divided in four sections, this can be read like the introduction to cinema, then the talkies, then shift to its creepy, glorious, puppet cultural stature, which comes in full gears in the last part:
when the Jeff Koons-like mirrored Mickeys appear on screen accompanied by The Proclaimers' great "Joyful Kilmarnock Blues", this transcends memorabilia, nostalgia, jots of creepiness and mock atmosphere, the collecting thrust and becomes a display of verve that is unfair to appropriate as retro.
This is what movies are for, and Kenneth Anger knows it and plays with it in this great ten minutes pop poem of his.
Thank you.