Look Back at Anger

When I read of Kenneth Anger's death this past May, my first thought was that another old young Turk has left the building. Along with Godard, it's difficult to call to mind anyone that's left still capable of pushing buttons. Thankfully, Alejandro Jodorowsky is still with us.

Anger has a special place in my heart, not the least because i came across his wonderfully tawdry and lurid bullshit-laden tome "Hollywood Babylon" in the seventies. At 18, all you needed to get my attention was to put Jayne Mansfield and her amplitudinous cleavage on the cover of a book. I began reading it and was pretty revolted. A lot of what I read was transparently gossip, hearsay, and the aforementioned dung from a bull's rectum. 

In the 80s, i kept stumbling across references to Anger and his work and had pretty much forgotten about his book. I have vague memories of seeing Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome at the Off the Wall Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it didn't leave much of an impression, mostly because I was more interested in its antecedents in experimental film from Richter, Duchamp, Buñuel, and the earlier explorers. Little did I know that dismissiveness cost me, I think, in my appreciation of what came after Anger's work (let alone his contemporaries whose works I didn't see until many years later.) 

Nevertheless, his name kept coming up, often in pretty reverential terms and particularly in relation to filmmakers as varied as David Lynch, John Waters, and Guy Maddin. Then, thank the cinematic gods for the Harvard Film Archive, I received a full immersion in Anger's work. Over a couple of nights, if I remember correctly, they screened all of the Magick Lantern Cycle and other works. This was in the late nineties and I found myself kicking myself - hard - for not having more actively sought out his work. 

From the get-go, each of these works seemed to be examples of practical magic; I knew next to nothing about Anger's influences, except for what whatever was in program notes, but I knew those influences from the films. Later discovering his involvement with Thelema, myth, and magic on the one hand and his life as a quite enigmatic gay man whose origin story (likely fabricated) began as a child actor on the set of 1935's A Midsummer's Night Dream, on the other, made all the sense in the world. 

There was nothing hidden in Kustom Kar Kommandos, Scorpio Rising, or any of his films that didn't express who Anger was. Sure, the eroticism is codified by the fetishization of chrome, leather, and cute lads, but there is very much both a playful and surging sexuality through these pieces. The further along we go with Anger, the more complex the imagery and themes become. This is literal in both senses; the layering of images on top of one another, the use of fade-ins and collaging of visuals grows more complex (the editing must have taken forever) and the richness of what lay beneath (and around ) those images grows accordingly. 

Anger's first films were shot when he was fourteen and those early works are since lost to time. Attending the University of Southern California, he dropped peyote and smoked pot, and made his first masterpiece Fireworks, a film that feels like an unabashed celebration of what it meant to be a gay man in late 1940s America (where homosexuality was illegal; this is something to keep in mind throughout his life and work). Anger was arrested for obscenity on the film's release, a charge that was overturned when the film was declared to be art, not pornography. Indeed, in the 21st century, it would be hard to find anything pornographic about it, but it is at once cautionary in terms of the beating our protagonist receives at one point and celebratory for the eventual pairing he achieves. At seventeen, it could be said that this was Anger's manifesto. As with a number of his works, he continued to rework it for decades (until 1980); it could also be considered the first example of his process that feels as much like a painter or printmaker's in terms of working with different versions, adapting earlier works to current situations.

From Fireworks (1947)

He followed up with Puce Moment, a short that exemplifies Anger's love of Hollywood and cinema. There were more intended scenes beyond the focus on Yvonne Marquis as a queen of the silent screen and the poetry that arises from Anger's close shots of her face as she dons a puce dress. Marquis, a cousins of his, could well have been a silent siren and we sense the end of the era as we see her recline on a balcony with Los Angeles in the distance. Her descent into the darkness that ends the film resonates with Anger's statement that he was filming ghosts.

After Puce Moment, he left the states to live and work in Paris. Apparently, this wasn't completely planned but also, at least partly in response to being blacklisted of having been a member of trade unions (again, context: this is 1950 and the Red Scare had picked up immense steam.) According to Anger, he traveled to Paris after having received a letter from Jean Cocteau who had seen Fireworks at the Festival du Film Maudit in 1949 and admired it quite a bit. 

Yvonne Marquis in Puce Moment (1949)

In short order, he created Rabbit's Moon/La lune des lapins and in Italy, filming in the garden of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Eaux d'Artifice (the latter in Rome, the fountains and waterfalls seen throughout the film as allusions to golden showers, a practice that the occultist Cardinal d'Este allegedly enjoyed). Both films were intended to be parts of larger works that were never completed, but stand on their own as they are.

At this point, it's worth noting that Kenneth Anger's life was already full of contacts and collaborations with other seminal artists and relationships with or tangential to the well-to-do or even the political well-placed (his cousin Yvonne married the president of Mexico). Another person who had admired Fireworks was Stan Brakhage and it's a tragedy of avant-garde cinema that the film they collaborated on was confiscated at the film lab developing it for obscenity (that word again) and destroyed.

After returning to the United States in 1953 to help settle his mother's estate, he created another visionary masterpiece, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, as opulent a film as anyone's ever made and loaded with enough mythic and occult references to seed a thousand student theses. If it were only that, it would be worth a watch, but as I mentioned earlier, an Anger film is something like an initiation into the Mysteries. There is a palpable sense of something outside the frame that feels alive. Additionally, Marjorie Cameron, one of the finest occult artists of the mid-century, plays "the Scarlet Woman" and Kali. Anger also recruited Anais Nin as Astarte and fellow avant-garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington as the sleepwalker Cesare. Anger himself played Hecate and frankly, it's really a film that renders writing or talking about it kind of useless. Yes, it's title is inspired by Coleridge's Kublai Khan; yes, there are Thelemite and mythological references throughout, but it's difficult to get across how gorgeous the film is. 

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

Cameron as The Scarlet Lady in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

More from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome:

I should also mention that, as with Puce Moment, Anger revisited Inauguration and switched out the original soundtrack (Janacek's Glagolitic Mass) for the Electric Light Orchestra's album Eldorado. If there are missteps in his work, it's these. Replacing Verdi with psychedelic folk rock in the case of the former and Janacek with ELO in the latter, dates both films and locates them in definite cultural periods. The works are diminished by association with (and don't get me wrong; I like both replacement works, but just not for these projects) what could be charitably called camp substitutions. 

The collage element of incorporating the hell sequence from the 1911 silent L'Inferno is seamless and effective; on a reworking of the film, Anger layered the images (before, the film was projected on three different screens) and before long, was shown in universities and art galleries for decades. It won the Prix du Cine-Club Belge and the Prix de l'Age d'Or, among other film festivals (including being projected on three screens at Expo 58, the Brussels World Fair.

Anger returned to the states after living and traveling in Europe (one of his travel partners being no less than Alfred Kinsey) and filming a documentary - now lost - on Thelema Abbey for the British series Omnibus. It was around this time that Anger with ghostwriter Elliot Steen wrote Hollywood Babylon. Steen was not without bonafides; he was a film critic for the Financial Times and the Village Voice, wrote for Film Comment and Sight and Sound, had managed the literary review Janus in Paris and was a well-regarded film historian. We might assume that he needed the money as much as Anger. 

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1961, Anger completed Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos. Scorpio Rising was another film that met with obscenity charges and was actually banned before the charge was overturned by the California Supreme Court. It's not hard to see why it ruffled feathers; it's a poetic and jarring ode to biker subculture that incorporates a substantial amount of what some would consider blasphemy, nudity, and a visual equivalence of the protagonist Scorpio with Jesus Christ. I suspect that were it seen by today's crop of conservatives, it might still cause a bit of discomfort. That said, it's a stunning work and Anger called it "a death mirror held up to American culture." This adds to the idea that the live fast-die young ethos of not just biker culture, but a large part of youth culture in general is predicated on the pressures of conformity in American society at the time and the disaffection young people felt with that conformity. 

Scorpio Rising (1963)

Scorpio Rising (1963)

As with much of Anger's work, the shifting times are reflected in these sometimes opaque works, though that opacity will vary depending on familiarity with the man's influences, and the times they were created in. An argument has been made that both these films were both precursors to music videos by a good twenty years. The use of music and the specific choices Anger made are integral to his work, not simply as background or atmosphere, but thematically and structurally, as well.

Begun and originally shot three years earlier, 1969's Invocation of My Demon Brother ups the ante in almost every way. Anger's thematic preoccupations with sex, death, and ritual magic are in full bloom. Mick Jagger's electronic score is almost timeless and the film itself seems to presage almost directly the nightmarish imagery in a number of Lynch's work. Added to a kind of sense of both dread and fascination is Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer. Beausoleil is currently serving a life sentence for murder while an associate one Charles Manson. The sense of something more going on with the film is Anton LaVey's performance as "His Satanic Majesty" and the image of a nude male, head obscured, early in the film beginning to draw a knife across his chest and later with his arms crossed like those of a figure on an Egyptian sarcophagus. 

Stills from Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969):

Interspersed with these images are scenes from a helicopter landing in what appears to be Vietnam taken from news footage. It is a short clip repeated as a kind of refrain that seems to ask what is the real evil in the world. On this last point, knowing Anger's Crowleyian dimension, the question wouldn't be framed in a simplistically moral sense; but rather, do we not invoke the immorality of war by other behaviors divorced from a higher order of reality? At least, this would make sense in the context of Thelema. 

Around the same time, Anger had begun shooting Lucifer Rising. Originally intended as a kind of documentary of the counterculture movement in California at the time (1966-1967), it grew into something far different and grander. What eventually materialized is the descent of Lucifer as the light bearer (as opposed to the hackneyed horned devil of church ladies and similar scolds) into this realm, summoned by various magi and Lilith herself (Marianne Faithful). It's a remarkable film and the stories behind its making are the stuff of legend and altogether well-documented enough to find elsewhere.

From Scorpio Rising (1981):

Lucifer Rising was released in 1981 and in short order, PBS shot a documentary about Anger and his work. By this point, he was near-broke and wrote Hollywood Babylon II for much needed cash. (Yes, I've read it, too.) In 1986, he sold the video rights of his films which no doubt helped him financially, but it also ensured a wider audience for his films. For the next decade and a half or so, Anger would lecture about his work, screening his films at different venues and could well have coasted for the restof his days, but he returned to filmmaking in 2000 with Don't Smoke That Cigarette, and a year later, The Man We Want to Hang. These were followed by a number of other shorts (including one of my personal favorites, Mouse Heaven). His last project was Technicolor Skull, a musical/performance collaboration with Brian Butler.

Generally speaking, Kenneth Anger may be the best known filmmaker of his generation, though his contemporaries and near-contemporaries are gaining in wider recognition. That said, Anger stands alone among his peers in terms of a unique vision and constant reinvention. It's a commonplace to note that dying in your mid-90s is a pretty good long time to have lived as a human. What makes it worthwhile is that, like Godard, his contemporary, Anger never seemed interested in living in the past or rehashing old stuff (though no doubt he needed to keep the promotional circuit going to stay alive.)

Much of his work is readily available on YouTube and at the Internet Archive and I recommend checking what's available at your earliest convenience. Better still, the very best, would be to catch his films on a larger screen. Keep an eye out for retrospectives at museums and universities, but if you can, do try to see his work on something bigger than even your large screen TV.