Kenneth
Anger
by Alice L. Hutchison
Black Dog Publishing, London 2005
260 pp., b/w illus. Paper, $39.95
ISBN: 1904-772-03-X.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
A child actor in the 1935 movie version
of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Kenneth Anger began
directing his own camp, arty short films
as a teenager. Fireworks, made
when he was 17 in 1947, depicts a young
hero's pickup of a sailor, then his beating
by a group of gobs on shore leave, told
in a fast, impressionistic series of arresting
images. The hero's chest is ripped open
to expose an electric meter behind his
viscera; the face of his nude lover on
a bed is scratched into a sunburst; erections
viewed under a bed sheet or white pants
become African carvings and roman candles
sputtering. Among its notable viewers,
Tennessee Williams praised it, but Merce
Cunningham found it repulsive and called
the cast "sick boys." Two years later,
Anger's Puce Moment was a six-minute
evocation of 1920 female movie stars,
and Rabbit Moon featured the romantic
triangle of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine.
He later substituted a Temptations ballad
for its original pop soundtrack.
In 1949 he wrote an essay for Cahiers
du Cinema, and its first English translation
appears in this book. "Modesty and the
Art of Film" called for small, personal
movies, inspired by the work postwar Japanese
directors were doing, instead of Hollywood
blockbuster extravaganzas. "The dream
of a personal, free cinema can be fulfilled
as long as you are modest". In 1952 he
completed a film based on Lautremont's
Les Chants des Maldoror, and Eaux
d'Artifice (1953) that featured an
eighteenth century female dwarf wandering
among the Baroque fountains at Tivoli.
Histoire d' O was filmed in 1954
and completed 1961, and this movie of
Pauline Réage's bestselling tale
of sadomasochism starred the daughter
of DeGaulle's Minister of Finance. The
boyfriend of the actress provided money
to finance the film, but it was traced
to the ransom paid for the kidnapped automobile
manufacturing heir Eric Peugeot. Only
20 minutes of the planned 90 minute film
was shot before the scandal stopped the
production.
Anger's next body of work was influenced
by the early twentieth century English
occultist, Aleister Crowley. A family
inheritance in 1954 allowed Anger to make
the 38 minute 16 millimeter color film
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
with Anais Nin, costume collector Samson
de Brier, and Marjorie Cameron as the
Scarlet Woman. After that, The Thelm
Abbey was a 1955 documentary for English
television on the ruins of Crowley's muralized
temple, built in Sicily in the early 1920s.
Anger advocated the restoration of its
murals, "hyper-psychedelic murals, goblins
and devils in fabulous color, scarlet
and pumpkin and orange . . . similar in
feel to Ensor". Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey appeared
onscreen to discuss Crowley's "sex magick".
In his spiritual quest Crowley had passed
through the hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn, which included Constance (Mrs. Oscar)
Wilde, novelist Bram Stoker and artist
Aubrey Beardsley, into the Ordo Templi
Orientis (O.T.O.), a sex magic organization
founded in Berlin in 1912. Marjorie Cameron,
the actress in Anger's Pleasure Dome,
married Jack Parsons, co-founder of the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena
and the leader of the O.T.O. Agape Lodge
in Los Angeles in the 1940s. This lodge
included L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the
Church of Scientology.
In 1959 Anger published Hollywood Babylon,
his gossipy and lurid compendium of tales
of film industry decadence, in France.
He was filmed in Paris' Père Lachaise
cemetary by Stan Brakhage for Brakhage's
The Dead. Encouraged by Brakhage
to return to the US, Anger then made his
most famous work, Scorpio Rising.
This 1963 ancestor of Pop music videos
intercuts transgressive imagery of supermacho
bikers, Nazis, and TV stars with the speed
of a Brakhage film, using one or two frame
images. It is a work very much of its
era, like James Rosenquist's billboard-sized
Pop paintings of collaged consumer Americana.
The homoerotic preening of an Italian-American
New York motorcycle gang is juxtaposed
with Nazis, Christ from silent movies,
Bela Lugosi as Dracula, over a pop song
soundtrack that included Elvis' "Devil
in Disguise". The film was seized by Los
Angeles police after an American Nazi
party member complained. At its trial,
poet Allen Ginsberg and critic Susan Sontag
testified as to its "redeeming social
value". In these days of nearly nude lads
cavorting in the posters in the Abercrombie
and Fitch store windows in the suburban
mall, Anger's movie seems tame and proper.
Soon after Scorpio Rising, a Brakhage/Anger
collaboration involving swans and flashing
red lights was destroyed by Kodak processing
laboratories personnel, who routinely
destroyed material they thought dangerous.
Anger then proposed to the Ford Foundation
a film, Kustom Kar Kommandos, and
got a grant. He produced a three-minute
loving look at the chrome and Kandy Apple
lacquers of fetishitic hot rods. About
the same time in Great Britain, J. G.
Ballard wrote the novel Crash celebrating
the eroticism of chrome and steel automotive
surfaces and protuberances. In California,
Anger shot Invocation of My Demon Brother
(1969) using footage of a Rolling Stones
concert, produced by Stones' girlpal Anita
Pallenberg. Invocation had a soundtrack
by Mick Jagger canoodling on a Moog synthesizer
and featured many of the crowd hanging
around the Robert Fraser Gallery, where
Anger first showed Scorpio Rising
in London. Yet part of the film involved
a ritual in the Haight Ashbury's old Straight
Theater on Haight Street, featuring Anton
LaVey of the Church of Satan and Bobby
Beausoleil. At that time Beausoleil was
guitarist for the band Love, but as a
member of the Manson family he served
prison time for involvement in the murders
of actress Sharon Tate and others. This
footage was stolen during another ritual
at the Straight Theater (which was later
converted into a grocery and art-supply
store), and has never been located.
Lucifer Rising (1969) had a soundtrack
by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, which was
later replaced by music by Beausoleil.
Marianne Faithfull stars as Lillith, and
she is filmed at a Celtic temple in the
Black Forest that had been a gathering
place of Hitler Youth. This is juxtaposed
with footage shot in Egypt, in celebration
of the Angel of Light, whose motto is
"The key to joy is disobedience". The
film intends to present the Love Generation
of the 1960s in opposition to the Death
Generation of the lingering 1950s depicted
in Scorpio Rising. A collaborator
on the project was Donald Cammell, co-director
with Nicholas Roeg of Performance,
which starred Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg.
Cammell's father had been a dedicated
Crowleyite. The film was exhibited with
a poster by psychedelic California poster
and comic book artist Rick Griffin.
Anger arranged for commercial re-release
of his Magick Lantern cycle of films in
2005, his work from Fireworks through
Lucifer Rising. After filming a
gnostic mass and a project with an Italian
TV company who brought him back to the
Thelm temple, Anger wrote and directed
a documentary on Crowley titled with what
the Beaverbrook papers had called him,
The Man We Want to Hang. He shot
some footage of cricketers on a lawn in
a bucolic manner, evoking a Whistler painting
for a project funded by Paul Getty and
left unfinished when Getty died in 2003.
He wrote two sequels to Hollywood Babylon,
and a contribution to a compendium of
suicides that included Michael Cooper,
Anger's friend and the photographer for
Peter Blake's cover of Sergeant Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose collage
included images of both Anger and Crowley.
Another suicide subject of the documentary
was Anger's neighbor and friend, the singer-songwriter
Elliott Smith, yet the film remains held
up from distribution in conflict over
the music copyrights, which is also the
case of Janie Jent's documentary A
True Testimonial of the band MC5.
Mouse Heaven shows old Mickey Mouse
toys and was funded by a substantial Rockefeller
Foundation media grant (as is Craig Baldwin's
current project on Jack Parsons). For
its soundtrack Anger employed Ian Whitcomb's
ragtime orchestra. Evidently still hard
at work, the last film the book lists
is a seven minute Denunciation of Stan
Brakhage, evidently a score-settling
with a colleague and contemporary whose
editing technique was borrowed by Anger
to good effect.
Along with contemporaries Harry Smith
and Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger opened up
the imagistic, mystical, and poetic possibilities
of alternative/underground film in America
but brought to it his own transgressive
and Pop-saturated urban sensibility. Anger
was influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and
even edited a version of Que Viva Mexico!.
He was influenced by French experimentalists
like Jean Cocteau (especially Blood
of a Poet), whom he praised in a television
documentary on Cocteau, and Rene Clair's
cavorting dadaists of Entr'Acte.
In turn, he influenced the movies of San
Francisco's Craig Baldwin, Detroit's Cary
Loren, this reviewer, and many others.
Alice L. Hutchison's Kenneth Anger
is a really nice book to have on your
film studies shelf, handsome and abundantly-illustrated
with color frames from Anger's films .
. . even if its large horizontal size
means it sticks out of that shelf awkwardly.
Author Hutchison is mistaken when she
cites Baudelaire's Les Fleurs
du Mal as a work of the 1890s (though
it was popular then). And if you write
of a Pop artist, your PopCult citations
must be correct: She cites Tav Falco's
video in Vienna when she likely means
the late Austrian Falco of "Vienna Calling"
and "Rock Me, Amadeus" rather than the
American rockabilly Panther Burns bandleader.
She attributes the song "Smoke, Smoke,
Smoke" to Hank Williams, but it was Tex
Williams, and this reviewer's got the
78. The previous source for many Americans
on the facts of Anger's life and trajectory
of his work, Bill Landis' 1996 biography
Anger, is readily available from
HarperPerennial yet nowhere cited in Hutchinson's
bibliography.