I went to the Un Chant d’amour/Kenneth Anger screening yesterday, and it was awesome. Except at SIFF, I’ve never seen so many people packed into a screening of experimental films. This is the good that gay content can do. (For the bad that gay content can do, see Dan Savage’s review of Boy Culture, which was, embarrassingly, filmed in Seattle.)

The surprise of the evening for me was one of Anger’s less admired films, Rabbit’s Moon. Here’s Brian Frye’s description in this week’s DVD column:

In Rabbit’s Moon, Pierrot pantomimes his love affair with the moon. Shot in 35 mm on a Paris soundstage, it represents Anger’s re-creation of the theatrical Hollywood fantasies of his youth.

I’ve never been particularly excited about commedia dell’arte, perhaps because I’ve never seen it done or used well. (Incidentally, I’ve concluded there exists no good web page on commedia. Can somebody get on that, please? This one, which is in French, is along the right lines.)

Anger’s Pierrot (André Soubeyran) is adorably rabbity, with neither twitchy nose nor curled up paw-fingers to assist. It somehow seems right that he’d be in love with the rabbit in the moon. And the repeated moon sequence—close, closer, split-second of craters!—is just great. Admittedly, Claude Revenant (the actor who plays Harlequin) sucks. And it goes on too long. But Rabbit’s Moon is incredibly interesting: it’s Kenneth Anger without the testosterone, where performativity is inherent and isn’t just this coy leather costume that veils muscles as it draws attention to them.

If you missed it, you need this DVD:

And this one: