Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Kenneth Anger

Writers:

Genre:

Short

Plot:

A Slavonic Mass by Leos Janácek plays as historical figures, biblical characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome...

Plot Keywords:

Surrealism | Initiation | Ritual | Bizarre | Occult

Cast

Sampson De Brier	...	Lord Shiva, Osiris, Nero, The Great Beast
Marjorie Cameron	...	The Scarlet Woman, Kali
Joan Whitney	...	Aphrodite
Katy Kadell	...	Isis
Renate Druks	...	Lilith (as Renata Loom)
Anaïs Nin	...	Astarte
Paul Mathison	...	Pan
Curtis Harrington	...	Cesare / Slave / Sleep-walker
Kenneth Anger	...	Hecate
Peter Loome	...	Ganymede

Runtime:

38 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Movie Connections:

Features Puce Moment (1949)

Self-indulgent and undisciplined

I first encountered this work around 1967, in a period when I was seeing many underground films in New York and Los Angeles, some shown in progress by the makers themselves. It was a heady time, and my memory was of a richly textured, opulent work that was surely Anger's magnum opus up to that time.

Last week, more than 3 decades later, I saw it again and was amazed at how inept and self-indulgent it was. The only thing holding it together is the appropriated sound track, Leos Janacek's masterful Glagolitic Mass, a creation that is far older than the film but has retained its genius. The visuals (like all of Anger's work, this is a silent movie with music) are little more than a pretentious thrift-shop costume show aspiring to pageantry, with little detectable underlying meaning or cinematic form.

The notion of camp was not yet formulated in 1954, when IotPD was made, but the film inadvertently exemplifies the concept -- or was Anger really satirizing a self-conscious social circle along with a certain type of dilettantish cluelessness and muddled cinematic thinking when he made this? What a huge disappointment after mistakenly thinking so well of this movie for so many years!