Puce Moment is a short

Short subject

A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...

 6 minute film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 by Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger is an American underground experimental filmmaker, occasional actor and author...

, author of the Hollywood Babylon

Hollywood Babylon

Hollywood Babylon is a book by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger which details the sordid scandals of many famous and infamous Hollywood denizens from the 1900s to the 1950s. First published in the US in 1965, it was banned ten days later and would not be republished until 1975...

books, filmed in 1949. Puce Moment resulted from the unfinished short film Puce Women. The film opens with a camera watching 1920's style flapper gowns being taken off a dress rack. The dresses are removed and danced off the rack to music. (The original soundtrack was Verdi opera music; in the 1960s, Anger re-released the film with a new psychedelic folk-rock soundtrack performed by Jonathan Halper.) A long-lashed woman, Yvonne Marquis, dresses in the purple puce

Puce

Puce is a color that is defined as ranging from reddish-brown to purplish-brown, with the latter being the more widely accepted definition found in reputable sources. Puce is a shade of red. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of "puce" from 1787...

 gown and walks to her vanity to apply perfume. She lies on a chaise longue which then begins to move around the room and eventually out to a patio. Borzoi

Borzoi

The borzoi is a breed of domestic dog also called the Russian wolfhound and descended from dogs brought to Russia from central Asian countries. It is similar in shape to a greyhound, and is also a member of the sighthound family.The system by which Russians over the ages named their sighthounds...

s appear and she prepares to take them for a walk.

The gowns used were owned by Anger's grandmother who had been a costume designer in the silent film era. Anger attempts to recreate silent era style by using alternating camera speeds. The film was made in the house of Sampson De Brier

Arthur Jasmine

Arthur Jasmine , also known as Samson De Brier or Sampson De Brier, was an American film actor.-Biography:He was born on 4 April 1899 in the U.S.A. at St...

, a silent film actor, who later appeared in Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is a short 38 minute film by Kenneth Anger, filmed in 1954. Anger created two other versions of this film in 1966 and the late 1970s. According to Anger, the film takes the name "pleasure dome" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's atmospheric poem Kubla Khan...

.

Yvonne Marquis moved to Mexico shortly after the film was made. Anger reveals Marquis was a mistress to Lázaro Cárdenas

Lázaro Cárdenas

Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940.-Early life:Lázaro Cárdenas was born on May 21, 1895 in a lower-middle class family in the village of Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He supported his family from age 16 after the death of his father...

, the Former President of Mexico.