On Kenneth Anger

There may not be another film artist who has known his own interior world and realised it through his art quite so vividly and in as much detail as Kenneth Anger. One could easily describe Anger’s work as a ‘wild mixture’ of Hollywood (where he grew up: he played the changeling child in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), black magic (out of Alistair Crowley) and homosexuality in the manner of so many of the blithe descriptions that colour too much film criticism today and are a staple of breathless festival banter. Over the years we have grown used to a debasement of critical language that takes great delight and expends enormous amounts of energy in listing the mix of thematic and iconographic elements that make up a given film without the slightest attention paid to nuance or to the immediate materials at hand. The fact is that Anger’s very private but miraculously expressive cinema is all nuance. There are countless examples in the film world, on both the avant-garde and the mainstream sides, of artists who create apparently private symbologies and imagery that is really a mix and match of different sources and signs, a grab bag of influences and textures that suggests some kind of aesthetic bazaar. It might be the very worst tendency in film-making. Which is why the films of Kenneth Anger are, now more than ever, so precious: they are diamond hard in their beauty, and that beauty is inseparable from their immersion in the iconography that thrills, excites and incites the artist behind them. Anger’s is not an Animistic cinema like that of his arch-nemesis Stan Brakhage. It is not a cinema that proposes to animate the world. Rather, it films its subjects (including Bobby Beausoleil of Manson fame, Anais Nin, Mick Jagger and, somewhat less famously but perhaps more memorably, Yvonne Marquis, Scorpio Rising‘s Bruce Byron and the albino man who provides what might be the most bracing images in Anger’s entire oeuvre, in Invocation of My Demon Brother) as though they already walk in a magic world with rules and forms of its own, and in which conventional hierarchies have been rearranged.I know next to nothing about the elaborate system of beliefs behind Anger’s images, which doesn’t matter one iota since it’s the fervency with which the artist grasps those beliefs that gives the images their potency. The four films in this program represent a wide spectrum of images and sensations. I think that is the proper way to speak of Anger. One might say that his cinema is a montage of archetypes, and that his very precise proximity to those archetypes – so precise that one measures his images in terms of varying levels of eroticism, fascination and a strange awe – that creates the charge in his cinema. In Fireworks, the earliest of Anger’s films that has survived and the one that was his passport to the international film world (it was adored by Cocteau), the homo-erotic Scorpio Rising, homo-eroticism is explicitly and fetishistically tied to the metallic, leather and flesh world of the Brooklyn biker scene (‘Thanatos in black leather, chrome and bursting jeans,’ to use the director’s own mythological language). In Invocation of My Demon Brother, Anger leaves the singularised imagery of his other work and builds a terrifying machine in which the hypnotic shots of the Albino man and assorted rough trade reclining nude with their legs draped over one another are placed in contact with the Stones in concert (Jagger did the film’s pulsating electronic score), Bobby Beausoleil as Anger’s beautiful muse/devil incarnate, Anger himself performing a magic ritual on stage, and troop landings in Vietnam. In Lucifer Rising (named after the figure Anger identified with most during this period of his life), Anger creates a gorgeous mythological tapestry in which the world is set aright through Crowleyan magic.In each of the four films it is the absolute belief in Crowley’s black art that allows Anger, paradoxically, to be a great documentarist of the respective moments in which they were filmed. Fireworks, based on a dream that Anger had about cruising sailors on shore leave, is an extraordinary document of the closeted homosexuality of the late 40s (‘This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas and the Fourth of July,’ Anger has said). Scorpio Rising really is the ‘death’s head held up to American culture’ that Anger claimed it to be. Invocation of My Demon Brother is a condensed, utterly pure nugget of America during the late 1960s: in a compact 11 minutes this extraordinary film encompasses everything that Oliver Stone has been working towards with each of his interminable, gaseous and insufferable ‘tapestries.’ As for Lucifer Rising, with its casting of Marianne Faithfull as Lilith, Donald Cammell (co-director of Performance) as Osiris and Jimmy Page as the young Crowley, Anger created a hidden, symbolic autobiography (he himself plays the Magus) with the world coming to a perfect Crowleyan order out the most rarefied air of the counterculture, making extraordinary use of its sybaritic atmosphere (the film makes an interesting companion piece to Garrel’s more upsetting La Cicatrice intérieure).In this short space I could never do justice to the films’ extraordinary visual impact. It is true that Anger might be our greatest magician behind the camera, but he is also one of the most clear-eyed observers of the culture around him, refracting it through his own philosophical prism. Along with Tarkovsky and only a very few others, he is one of the only film-makers deserving of that over-used but still quite potent term: visionary. Programme:Fireworks (1947)Scorpio Rising (1964)Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) ucifer Rising (1980)