1947, revised 1978, color, 8 minutes
Concept, direction and editing by Kenneth Anger. Camera Assistant: Tourjansky. Music by Andy Arthur. Filmed in Paris. Cast: Andre Soubeyran (Pierrot), Claude Revenant (Harlequin), Nadine Valence (Columbine).
Pierrot unsuccessfully reaching for the Moon and for Columbine, to the music of Andy Arthur.
Fable of the Unattainable (the Moon) combining elements of Commedia Dell'Arte with Japanese myth.
A lunar dream utilizing the classic pantomime figure of Pierrot in an encounter with a prankish, enchanted Magic Lantern . . . (Kenneth Anger)
The Japanese myth to which Anger refers is that a white rabbit lives in the moon. He says, "It's interesting that the Japanese do not see a face or Man in the Moon as we Westerners do, but see a mythological animal, the white rabbit." Rabbit's Moon, as Anger points out, interrelates this myth with the Italian Commedia Dell'Arte, with the moon lover Pierrot (Pierrot Lunaire) and Lucifer-Harlequin, with his apparition to lure Pierrot to his doom, Columbine.
In 1950, Kenneth Anger attempted suicide in Paris. Rabbit's Moon is a transposed, highly poeticized transposition of that incident. It was shot in the studio belonging to director Jean-Pierre Melville which had been lent to Anger. After a few days of shooting, Melville unexpectedly reclaimed his studio, although the film was not completed, Moon remained a "lost" film for twenty years until Anger finally edited it in 1970, then adding a musical score. This disturbing fable takes place in an extroardinary, tinselly forest, somewhat similar in texture to the fairy woodland in the Max Reinhardt-William Dieterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Warner Brothers, 1935), in which Anger appears as a child actor.
All of Anger's films are seperate movements in one vast film, a large symphony in which all kinds of rituals occur as here with the stultifying return of zoom after zoom into the blinding full moon which looks down on the progress of Pierrot from romantic illusion to destruction. If Pierrot is Anger himself, then Pierrot's new toy, the Magick Lantern, is obviously the cinema. Rabbit's Moon is exquisitely beautiful claustrophobic psychodrama. (Elliot Stein Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions)
(Note: the print of Rabbit's Moon included in the Magick Lantern Cycle is Anger's latest version of the film. It has been step-printed to increase the pace, the music has been changed from the earlier Temptations' soundtrack, and the zooms to which Elliott Stein refers have been removed.)
