Eaux d'artifice
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"Shot in black-and-white through red filters, Kenneth Anger's short avant-garde work was filmed in the Garden of the Villa D'Este in Tivoli, Italy, a water garden of fountains and classical statuary. A woman dressed in 18th century period costume strolls through the park -- her movements gradually becoming more frenetic until she seems to become one with the water. One of Anger's more elemental though highly stylized films, it focuses on the interplay of water, light and stone."
— The Library of Congress
Eaux d'Artifice
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1993.
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Eaux d'artifice (or Water Works in English) is a short experimental film directed by Kenneth Anger released in 1953.
Why It Rocks
- As Anger shot at the Garden of the Villa D'Este, he used the garden, famed for its ornate fountains, for what's called a "single-image film" that basically led up to a "union between protagonist and landscape". It may not have a proper story or any dialogue, but it makes up for that by featuring a beautiful play of light on bubbling and cascading water.
- Clever soundtrack usage with “Winter” Concerto and other passages of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons being played during the short. The music's not only appropriate to the director's classical settings and style, but it also provides a rhythmic framework for editing. Double exposures, montages and dissolves all add narrative conventions to the shots.
- The music's used as both a metronome and as a narrative guide. When the music increased in speed and urgency, tension's built by cutting the imagery in a rapid pattern. Pans and tilts were also timed to measure the beat of the score, with the cinematography ranging from simply representational to abstract, from easily deciphered wide shots of the garden to close-ups of the water, backlit, and shot in slow motion until they resemble gleaming jewels arcing across the screen.
- A lot of the eerie beauty of the film comes from the fact that it was shot on infrared stock and printed with a cyan filter, imitating nitrate. This was intentionally done to set an evocative preternatural mood.
- Carmillo Salvatorelli pulls off a surprisingly convincing performance as the mysterious, nameless "water witch", the closest thing the film has to a main character.
- Clever editing, with a range of approaches being used, including a typical shot-to-shot scene scheme and a more ambitious montage based on emotion and atmosphere. It should also be noted that having a short actress for the role was an intentional choice as it made the fountains look larger.
- The viewer doesn't have to have prior knowledge of Anger’s earlier work in order to appreciate the short.
- Kenneth Anger had dedicated exploration of certain themes, though the major theme is his commitment to the version of modern occultism propounded by Aleister Crowley. He shows particular dedication to the figure of Lucifer as a god of light and thus “patron saint of movies”, a dedication that finds one of its clearest expressions in this short.
The Film
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