Eaux d'Artifice

Eaux d'artifice (1953) is a short experimental film by Kenneth Anger.

Eaux d'artifice
Directed by	Kenneth Anger
Produced by	Kenneth Anger
Starring	Carmilla Salvatorelli
Cinematography	Kenneth Anger
Edited by	Kenneth Anger
Release date	1953 (1953)
Running time	12 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Summary

The film consists entirely of a woman dressed in eighteenth-century clothes who wanders amidst the garden fountains of the Villa d'Este^[1] ("a Hide and Seek in a night-time labyrinth"^[2]) to the sounds of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", until she steps into a fountain and momentarily disappears.

Production

The film was shot in the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Italy. The actress, Carmilla Salvatorelli (not "Carmello"), was "a little midget" Anger had met through Federico Fellini.^[3] Anger used a short actress to suggest a different sense of scale, whereby the monuments seemed bigger (a technique he said was inspired by etchings of the gardens in the Villa d'Este by Giovanni Battista Piranesi).^[3]

Inspiration

The title, a play on words, is meant to suggest Feux d'artifice (Fireworks), in obvious reference to Anger's earlier 1947 work. Film critic Scott MacDonald has suggested that Fireworks was a film about the repression of (the film-maker's) homosexuality in the United States, whereas Eaux d'Artifice "suggests an explosion of pleasure and freedom."^[3]

Legacy

In 1993, this short film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[4][5]

See also

• List of avant-garde films of the 1950s