1965, color, 3.5 minutes
Concept, direction and editing by Kenneth Anger. Camera assistant: Arnold Baskin.
Music by The Parris Sisters. Filmed in San Bernadino. Cast: Sandy Trent (Car
Customiser).
To the soundtrack of ?Dream Lover,? a young man strokes his customized car with a
powder puff.
Kustom Kar Kommandos was originally to be an eight part, 30 minute film which
Anger described as ?an oneiric vision of a contemporary American (and specifically
Californian) teenage phenomeno, the world of hot-rod and customized cars.? Anger made
the episode presently shown as Kustom Kar Kommandos to raise funds to finish
the film, but was unable to do so and the project was abandoned.
Pygmalion and his machine mistress. (Kenneth Anger)
Kustom Kar Kommandos evokes the Dream Lover, but as a blind for the
Charioteer of the Tarot Trumps. Infinitely more subtly, it restates the theme of
Fireworks. It is about the simultaneous longing for and illusory attainment of an
ideal. Anger?s camera gliding with the delicacy of a scrap of down caresses it with a giant
white powder puff. The images are suffused with a pink glow from the background, the
Maker appears in complementary azure. The film starts with a ?waking? image of the Kar
door opening into the camera to show the Scorpio-red inside, and then moves through ten
lingering, indefinable dissolves which completely circle the Kar, eventually returning to the
original shot, but with the Maker this time getting into the Kar, settling and driving off.
The images center on the powder puff twice brushed by tiny erotic gusts, the incarnation
of the spirit of a move: very campy, but also achingly precarious. In a hallucinatory shot
of Sandy?s relection on the inside of the passenger Kar door, there is a moment of fustion
- the color elements (pink, azure, red, and the dull amber of the Kar itself) fuse and the
Maker and Kar are one. The final shot of the sequence shows his face serene, impassive,
moving as if directed by some non-conscious force: he drives off. ?Every night I hope and
pray a Dream Lover will come my way.? (Tony Rayns)
