HARVARD INDEPENDENT FILM GROUP
JUNE 14th
INTERCLUB SCREENING

KENNETH ANGER

More that any other filmmaker of his generation, Kenneth Anger is 
recognized by the public as a maker of underground, experimental 
cinema. To main-line film critics he is the first-remembered such 
filmmaker, one who combines cinematic talent and an aura of 
scandal. This image has helped and hobbled Anger, thrusting him 
into The spotlight but also leading to an incomplete perception of 
his work as an artist. He is well known for some of his films 
(Fireworks, Scorpio Rising, and to a lesser degree, Kustom Kar 
Kommandos) and for his book Hollywood Babylon. 

But the total body of Anger's film-work goes beyond those three 
movies, and Hollywood Babylon earned its reputation in a pirated 
and very different edition from the one which Anger finally authored 
in the United States in 1975 (nine years after the pirate version 
appeared). He is much more complex than the image of violence 
and eroticism that these works suggest. A much larger portrait is 
what I want to attempt to compose in this monograph. A portrait 
rooted in his words and his films. Even so, it can only be a
beginning, because as we shall see, Anger the artist is evolving,
changing, growing, and the dimensions of his work have become
clearer in time, both in relation to his own art and our ability to
comprehend it.
 
Anger's initiation into the cinema came in two phases when he was
very young. His grandmother was a wardrobe mistress in Hollywood,
offering him opportunities to change his identity years before he began 
to attend school. During this same period he was selected to act
in A Midsummer Night's Dream, playing the changeling prince. Years
later he would recall that "this rite of passage scampering in spangles
and plumes through Reinhardt's enchanted wood remains the shining
moment of my childhood" 1
 
Transfiguration and transformation are themes, working materials, that 
Anger has continued to explore in all of the years following his departure
from Beverly Hills. In the interim he rejected Christianity, his family, he 
began collecting stills and memorabilia from Hollywood and started 
making films himself (Ferdinand the Bull in 1937, just three years after 
his midsummer night's dreaming).
 
While he was in high school, before he began making the films that 
start with Fireworks, Anger was introduced to the work of Aleister
Crowley - an occult master from England, author of voluminous
writings which propound his philosophy of Magick. The relationship
of Crowley and Anger is obviously important: Anger refers to his work
frequently, has declared himself to be a disciple of Crowley and a
magus, has included images of Crowley in central positions in many of
his films (especially Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer
Rising). But while Anger is a student of Crowley it would be misleading
to assume that his films are essentially illustrations of Crowley. Quite
the contrary: Anger's interests and studies are very diverse. He has
spent much of his life traveling, leading to his making such unlikely
projects as Rabbit's Moon (dealing with the classic Commedia
dell'Arte characters Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine). The occasion
for Anger to make the film was a suicidal depression. That he would
turn to such a "traditional" story at that moment of pain shows how
broad his horizons had become by his twentieth year. Crowley is one
of many important factors that should be considered in our response
to his work; others would have to include his love-hate of the
Hollywood film industry, his interest in ritual, his politics (the March
on the Pentagon), etc.
 
One of Crowley's central maxims was "Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the law..." For Anger, too, this is a primary premise. We can 
see evidence of this in his adoption of Puck in his film logo. Puck is 
described as "the name of a fancied, mischievous or tricksy goblin or
sprite, called also Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin." 2 Puck is also 
a figure in the Reinhardt-Dieterle A Midsummer Night's Dream, and a
rebellious trickster who can additionally be associated with Lucifer,
another classic figure Anger has embraced (classic in the canon of
John Milton and Paradise Lost, not the Christian sense). All rebels, 
as was Crowley, they constitute a foundation upon which Anger has 
built a mythic superstructure, his cinema.
 
Fireworks, Angers first extant film, was made when he was 17,
shot in three days in his parents' home while they were attending 
the funeral of a relative. Unexpectedly powerful and disturbing, the 
film was described by Jean Cocteau as coming "from that beautiful 
night from which emerge all the true works. It touches the quick of 
the soul and this is very rare." 3 When the film was shown in 
San Francisco for the first time, Maya Deren made a comparable |
observation, suggesting that Anger had opened a window on our 
common dreams. 4 Anger's own remarks on the work range from 
"A  dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking 'a 
light'  and is drawn through the needle's eye," 5 to this less cryptic
comment:
 
"It's a personal statement about my own feelings about violence and
(a) certain kind of masculinity. Also a treatment of a kind of myth in
America which relates to the American sailor. That's part of
history now, but the sailor then was a kind of sex symbol on one
another level there was a great deal of ambivalence and
hostility, latency, and fear in the image.…" 6 
 
Fireworks is well known for its sudden violence and graphic images of
mutilation, dreamlike In their intensity and fulfillment. Less
remembered are many of the small details that reinforce the narrative
of the film. The attention paid to the newspapers that blow along the
ground neutralizes any discomfort with the painted backdrop of the
bar. Likewise, the humor of the film is often overlooked: when the
body of the dreamer is ripped open a quivering electric gauge is found
inside, an image that does not make us laugh, but relax -- we are not
here undergoing the kind of eye-opening attack Bunuel and Dali
mounted in their Un Chien Andolou.
 
In Anger's remark, cited above, he speaks of a "dissatisfied
dreamer" who "awakes." This dreamer, before he awakes, sees
photographs in his dream of himself cradled in the arms of a sailor.
Then he rises from his bed, seeks his 'light,' and enacts the images he
dreamed. We must assume either the dreamer sees the future, or
makes it his own, and in so doing, discovers a companion. This is, of
course, what Anger does in making films -- he realizes his dreams,
makes his illusions real, to share with us. He finds a light as well--the
beam of a projector and the radiant energy that illuminates what is
before his camera -- a kind of magic ray that allows him to perform his
own magic, to employ the powers of nature for his own purposes.
 
In this monograph I am not going to attempt to discuss all of
Anger's works. Instead will skip forward to specific aspects of the
works that I believe have been missed and which contribute to a full
image of Anger the artist.
 
Three years after he made Fireworks, Anger was in Paris where the
cinema as another instrument of magick was employed in Rabbit's
Moon (see frame enlargement). Here the magick lantern creates a
"picture" of Pierrot's affection, but Columbine is stolen by Harlequin.
and the hapless Pierrot is left alone under the pitiless gaze of the
moon. Had Anger been able to complete the film, as planned. Pierrot
would have become lost in the woods, discovered a metro station
there, and found within it an infinite series 31 images of the moon
("Eclipse" shoe polish posters) extending away into the darkness. 
(For more on Rabbit's Moon, see Appendix D.)
 
Puns and wordplay are important to Anger. In the 1960's in
Invocation of My Demon Brother, he would use the name of actor-
composer Bobby Beausoleil in images as Beau-Soleil ("beautiful 
sun").  In Eaux d'artifice, the next film after Fireworks that he would 
complete as planned, Anger employed a similar use of words. As 
Alan Williams pointed out,
 
"Eaux d'artifice does not exist as a correct phrase in French; instead,
!he title is constructed by one of language's oldest artifices, the
pun. Eeux d'artifice means "Fireworks" (literally artificial fires), and
so eaux d'artifice are logically waterworks or 'artificial' waters."  7
 
The point to this linguistic juggling is that Anger sees Fireworks and
Eaux d'artifice as a pair of films, a notion that emphasizes the dream-
like and illusionistic qualities of the earlier film. Eaux d'artifice
develops around a costumed figure who moves through a garden of
fountains, a "Hide and Seek in a night-time labyrinth." 8 Essentially
the film is a musical development of this pursuit, culminating in the
assumption of the seeker into the fountains, becoming one with the
water, suggesting that, like the protagonist of Fireworks, the seeker
has found the light, been transmuted by the experience.
 
To watch Eaux d'artifice is to become very aware of the artifice of
the film (and, implicitly, of all films). Anger fashions a drama of flight
and observation with his synchronization of the images to Vivaldi's
music, and the visual manipulation of gargoyles seeming to leer at the
running figure (a dwarf, so as to increase the differential of scale).
None of this diminishes our admiration for the work; one is struck by
the virtuosity of Anger as an editor. In the context of his other films it 
is also a departure for him. Anger has often pointed to the importance 
of Sergei Eisenstein's work, with its emphasis on montage as the 
collision of images. 9 In films like Scorpio Rising, Anger freely 
intercuts dissimilar images to work with what Eisenstein called 
intellectual montage. In Eau d'artifice Anger follows the opposite 
mode of film editing, the Pudovkin option of continuity instead of 
collisions.
 
Rather than speak of Anger's subsequent films individually, I will
discuss all of them in the context of the major work of his career.
Lucifer Rising has occupied 11 of the last 27 years of the filmmaker's 
life (14 if we consider Invocation of My Demon Brother as a false start 
on Lucifer). With the completion of Eaux d'artifice Anger expanded 
his aim to larger, longer films, works that would be mythic rather than
dreams, color rather than monochrome, involving casts which
numbered ten or more, not five or less.
 
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome has its origins in a masque
organized by Renata Druks, a friend of Anais Nin. Anger attended the
masque, recognized that he could mould a similar gathering into "a
convocation of magicians in the guise of figures from mythology,
and assembled his performers at the home of Samson DeBrier. DeBrier
and Nin have both written about the filming, 11  and P. Adams Sitney 
12 has analyzed the film in extensive detail, so I will make only
two points. The central one is that the "figures from mythology" are
drawn from a pantheon that is distinctively Anger's: with the Great
Beast and the Scarlet Woman, Astarte and Pan, there was also Cesare
the Somnambulist, from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari! A second point is
that with this film Anger's works begin to assume the form of religious
rituals. Pleasure Dome centers on a consumption of the Eucharist
(even as its music is derived from Janacek's Mass). To screen this film
and subsequent works is presumably to join Anger in his role as
priest/magus/magician.

Scorpio Rising, released in 1963, won Anger a public following
unprecedented for an independent filmmaker. Variety reported on
May 12, 1966: "it opened recently in Greenwich Village House and
started racking up more money than the proprietors had ever seen.
Hence general release scheduled for July...Here it's mixed in with
surrealism-violence-motorcycles and 'seductive' male-torsos. More
people now find it funny when 'She Wore Blue Velvet' is played to a
shot of a stud buttoning up his blue jeans." Again, Sitney discusses the
film in depth, 13 and here I will postpone comment until later. Though
punctuated with references to The Wild Ones, Scorpio Rising became
a "source" itself, inspiring a whole series of Hollywood bike films, most
prominently Easy Rider and WR-Mysteries of the Organism by
Dusan Makavejev. Anger regards Scorpio Rising with a detachment
that some would find surprising: 14
 
"I have an ironic approach...That's the way I look at everything.
That's my view of the world. I'm an artist. In that film Scorpio
Rising) I'm simply viewing a certain phenomenon that was
happening at that particular rime. I don't see the (film) as a
homosexual statement. I see lit) as a human statement. 15
 
In 1959 Anger had published, in France, the book Hollywood
Babylon (J.J. Pauvert). Its publication in the United States in 1975,
substantially revised, sheds much light on Anger's ambivalent attitude
towards Hollywood following .I quotation by Aleister Crowley
Every Man and Every Woman is a Star") and a dedication ("to the
Scarlet Woman"). Anger begins the discussion with a description of the
mammoth sets for D.W. Griffith Intolerance. By paragraph five the
sets are deserted, "stranded like some gargantuan dream beside
Sunset Boulevard. 16  Astonishing pictures follow, of rubble strewn sets,
of the ruins of Belshazzar's court towering over bungalows, and then
of the human wreckage -- actors, directors, writers, producers, all
unable to handle the pressure of sudden wealth and publicity, turning
to drugs and drink and often death. For Anger the dissolution of
Hollywood began with its birth in "The Purple Dawn" (the title of the
first chapter).
 
The title of Hollywood Babylon bears another Anger irony.
Babylon, the capital of paganism, a center of worship for idols,
presaged Hollywood's modern image. And architecturally.
Hollywood was the sire for the reconstruction of Babylon, for D.W.
Griffith's "great leap into the unknown, his Sun Play of the Ages."17 
This "Sun Play of the Ages," Intolerance, was one of the most
daring films ever made in Hollywood. Released in 1916, the movie was
a unique experiment in editing for mass audiences. Four narratives
drawn from thousands of years of history were related simultaneously,
intermingling at an increasing rate as the film approached its climax.
Seymour Stern ranked it as one of t he two historic cornerstones of film
art, comparing it and Griffith's earlier Birth of a Nation to the Colossi of
Memnon in Thebes. 18 Intolerance and Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico
are the two films which most closely resemble Anger's leap into the
unknown, Lucifer Rising.

Lucifer Rising from the beginning has been conceived by Anger as
a kind of response to Scorpio Rising. His first efforts to film it began in
1966; the following quotations make clear his feelings about the
dialectic relationship between the two films (note that these are
Statements of intention, comments on a work not yet filmed)
 
The film Lucifer Rising is my answer to Scorpio Rising -- which was
a death mirror held up to American Culture. And for my own sake
I had to make an answer to it even though I still see plenty of
thanatic elements at work in America. it's a film about the Love
generation, but seen in depth -- like in the fourth dimension. And I
call it a love vision, and it s about love --the violence as well as the
tenderness...l began shooting with the spring equinox. I'm type
casting in my film, and one thing I've found is that since my film is
about demons -- but love demons -- I have to work fairly fast
because they tend to come and go...A demon is just a convenient
way of labeling a force..." 19
 
Like Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising is about several things. I'm an
artist working in Light, and that's my whole interest, really. Lucifer is
the Light God, not the devil, that's a Christian Slander. the devil is
always other people's gods. Lucifer has appeared in other of my
films; I haven't labeled him as such but there s usually a figure or a
moment in those films which is my "Lucifer" moment...l'm showing
actual ceremonies in the film; what is performed in front of the
camera won't be a re-enactment and the purpose will be to make
Lucifer rise. lt's the birthday party for the Aquarian Age...
Everything I've been saying so far has been leading up to this 
happening in the world today. His message is that the Key of Joy 
is Disobedience 20

Anger's statements about a film he was yet to make are of
particular interest both in regard to the films he had made, and in
regard to aspects of Lucifer Rising which have not been retained in the

ilm as we can now see it. Anger's emphasis on Light and Lucifer as the
"Light God" cast light on the earlier works -- Fireworks, Eaux d'artifice,
and Rabbit's Moon. In the first film, Anger's protagonist goes out into
the night "Seeking a Light," which is argot for a homosexual pick-up.
But for Anger it is a pursuit of Light as well: we soon see the
protagonist standing above a night-time highway, all black except for
the advancing headlights which approach as If in a swirling current.
When the protagonist (Anger) does find Light, it means death/rebirth,
and in the rebirth he is joined in bed by another whose face erupts
with scratched light. Eaux d'artifice is a film filled with fountains of
water and light (it is the play of light on the water that is so beautiful),
and at its climax Anger's protagonist becomes one with the shower of
water -- and light. In the new, short version of Rabbit's Moon, Anger
has replaced the music track with a song that includes the words "Give
him a light" as Pierrot raptly watches the moon.

Lucifer Rising incorporates a number of scenes in which the
iconography of demons is visually transformed by editing which
unambiguously associates what we initially take to be ominous images
with ceremonial headgear, the forces of nature, and other things that
we do not associate with evil. Anger's Lucifer has followers who are
pagan conjurers, but they are not Satanists in the malignant sense that
name usually confers.

In 1973, Jonas Mekas interviewed Anger, who at that point had
modified his conception of Lucifer Rising (much of which had at this
point been shot, but not edited):

"Frankly, it's taken me into some very strange corners...You see, I
didn't think it was about demons or hell, really. l was trying to make
a film about the Angel of Light. That was his first name. The Son of
Morning, you see. But now I almost believe what the Bible says.
Though the Bible says very little about Lucifer. He's censored out,
you see. Only a few lines. Satan, you know...So it's really about the
fallen Angel, the fall from grace, and the hope of redemption, of
climbing hack up the ladder. It's almost the story in a parable form
of the Prodigal Son who goes away and falls from grace and then is
accepted back in the family again.
 
Jonas: From the footage that I've seen...it looks like you're working
much through the forces of nature, with the images of elements of
nature.
 
"Yes, absolutely It's a metaphor. am trying to get away
from identifying with actor or actress as a person. I want to move
through nature, and the people are elements of nature also." 21
 
Even now it is not clear why some aspects Anger refers to in this
interview are not present in the film as of 1980. Perhaps, had Anger
been able to complete the 93 minute version, instead of this 45 minute

ersion, the Prodigal Son aspect would have been more visible.
Nevertheless, it is present, though not emphatically. Likewise, the
conception of Lucifer as Fallen Angel (the aspect present in John
Milton's Paradise Lost and in Crowley's Hymn to Lucifer -- see
Appendix B -- the "basis" of the film according to Anger) is not
emphasized; his Fall in the film is a consequence of the loss of the
knowledge of his lore -- he is an invisible, all-but-forgotten force -
the Lost God. 22

One who did not forget, who celebrates the power of Light, of
Morning, of fires in the sky and in the Earth, is Kenneth Anger. His
Lucifer Rising is a celebration, and an invocation of the power of
Magick to summon forth the forces of nature. Lucifer Rising begins
with images of the subterranean energy of the Earth, with Isis of Egypt
attending to the process of birth under the morning sun, with chains of
images that suggest the architecture of Egypt as metaphors for that
energy. This opening sequence dissolves to the face of a
contemporary magus, and the spectator must guess as to whether the
sequence was dreamed or imagined, experienced or anticipated. For
the form of Lucifer Rising is not linear but associative: Anger leaps
across centuries and millennia, condenses time and space in this film,
composing not a story but a portrait of a force that has pervaded all of
human history. The magus in the second sequence of the film, the
"Adept" or apprentice reappears throughout the film but his specific
identity is blurred, undercut, by the form of the film which places
such great attention on transformation. At the close of the second
sequence he is impaled on a lance that he commands, sinks into a 
bath,and again Anger dissolves the image -- coming "up" with Lilith, 
who rises from a stone sarcophagus and eventually makes her way 
to a Celtic temple in Germany, where she ascends to watch another
ceremony. In all of this Anger wields specifically filmic devices with
enormous skill. The darkened Adept dissolves to a light blue Lilith,
who proceeds to a yellow Egypt, and thence to the German site where
Anger elevates her up the steps with a series of vertical wipes that
alternate day and night. To watch the film is to become intensely 
aware of the kinds and qualities of light, of its presence and absence, 
of its force (the sun here is somewhat parallel to the moon in Rabbit's
Moon).

Lucifer Rising stands in stark contrast with Scorpio Rising in that
the games and fooling around that punctuate the earlier film are
totally absent here. The aura of the film is much more celebratory, like
the sense of triumph one feels in watching inauguration of the
Pleasure Dome. In the final sequences of Lucifer, as Isis and Osiris join
together to command forces still not understood, we join with them in
a sense of dominion that is ecstatic.
 
Anger's difficulties in making Lucifer Rising have been considerable. 
His first lead actor died, the second, Bobby Beausoleil, stole much 
of the footage Anger had shot in San Francisco in 1966 (this led to 
the making of Invocation of My Demon Brother). When filming finally 
resumed in the 1970's -- in Egypt, England, Germany, and the
United Stares -- Anger encountered more difficulties, including the
confiscation of his film for several years. Economic problems have
forced him, even now, to issue the film in a version shorter than he
desired. In some respects, events have helped him as well; 
Beausoleil, in prison for life, agreed to compose and play the film's 
soundtrack; this after three years work, he has executed with 
inspiration, making a striking film even more extraordinary. Anger 
was also able to obtain vivid performances from Marianne Faithfull, 
Myriad Gibril, Leslie Huggins and Sir Francis Rose (of whom 
Gertrude Stein wrote, "a rose is a rose..."). 

In the making for more than a decade, Lucifer Rising has inevitably 
been anticipated by many as an apocalyptic vision. After all, we are 
now approaching the end of the second millenium. What Anger has 
given us instead is a love vision, not The Final Battle. Anger has left 
us with a declaration that transformation and transcendence can be 
ours. The eddying smoke between the colossi at Memnon at the 
end of Lucifer Rising is such a declaration, his films the
transformation.
 

© Film in the Cities, February, 1980