Eaux d'Artifice
Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Infobox film Eaux d'artifice (1953) is a short experimental film by Kenneth Anger.
Summary
[edit]The film consists entirely of a woman dressed in eighteenth-century clothes who wanders amidst the garden fountains of the Villa d'Este<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> ("a Hide and Seek in a night-time labyrinth"<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>) to the sounds of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", until she steps into a fountain and momentarily disappears.
Production
[edit]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.<ref name="macdonald">Template:Cite book</ref> 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).<ref name="macdonald" />
Inspiration
[edit]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."<ref name="macdonald" />
Legacy
[edit]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".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>