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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathAuteurs
 
Puce Moment (Anger, Kenneth), 1949Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, Billy), 1950
 
 
 

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location of the culture industry. «Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome» is something almost approaching a Heimatfilm for Anger, who returned to Los Angeles, (his Heimat for years prior to that), specifically to make the film. The actors were recruited from the bohemian cliques, subcultures, and sects to which Anger belonged and which in turn belonged to the repressed specifics of Hollywood, just as the homosexuality of the leading men and ladies did. «Puce Momet» (1949) anticipates Wilder’s «Sunset Boulevard» (1950) on an underground level. Hollywood has often portrayed itself critically, even in its regular films. However, all of its criticism has persistently been tangled up again with the image of what is, on the one hand, indeed, a hard and career-obsessed milieu, yet one that is entirely preoccupied with producing itself, with cultivating its own talents. Officially, Hollywood has often accused itself of being evil, but always in the interest of its own artistic self-realization. For Anger, Hollywood is a production workshop that is highly dependent upon self-denial. However, Hollywood relies upon these and other thoroughly (so to speak) ‹perverse› human factors. And this is precisely the starting point for

 

Anger’s work.

4. Jack Smith

While Anger is interested in the lie inherent in ‹Hollywood› in general, and specifically, both in the repressed location and the repressed conditions of production, ultimately, he winds up focusing on the phantasm of the darkness of human nature. Jack Smith, however, and many of his cohorts in passing had another aspect in mind: he considered the failed product of the culture industry to be the highest, and most probably, the ultimate form of artistic authenticity. In his classic essay «The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,» [5] Smith describes the characteristics of an aesthetic that is to this day called «trash» or «camp» both very specifically and generally enough to have wide-reaching consequences, which, despite the fact that the regime of irony in contemporary culture has domesticated trash and camp, remains the point of departure for any response to the omnipresence of the culture industry. Smith characterized those who could only see the worst actress in the world in Maria Montez (which she,

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