Angery Young Man

American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger is probably best known for Hollywood Babylon, a cruel and unusual book about what the golden age of Hollywood looked like with its pants down. Born in 1927 or 1930 (depending on whether you listen to his biographer or himself) he started making films at age 11 or 14. The majority of his early work apparently does not survive, having been burned by its author in a fit of pique in 1967. Anger has become notorious for revising and re-editing the films that remain—four versions of his Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome have seen the light of a projector—and since 1967, the aim of his cinema seems to have been to ensure that his most enduring creation is the myth of Kenneth Anger, mystical visionary.

The nine short movies that Anger has decided will constitute the cinematic portion of that myth have been gathered together in the so-called Magick Lantern Cycle, which will be shown in two parts this Wednesday and next at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From the evidence that’s on display, the man works better with his pants down than with his mysticism up.

The earliest film preserved is 1947’s Fireworks—a definite pants-down item—of which Anger has written: “This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.” It comes off today as an experimental piece by a young filmmaker with a yen for muscular guys in sailor suits, who has watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin a few times too many. Its roughness is overwhelmingly redeemed by the outrageous obviousness of its visual metaphor (the film could have been subtitled ‘hello, sailor’), and pure gutsiness. Emotionally, Anger put everything on the line; it must have taken a lot of nerve for a 17-to-20 year-old kid to traffic in such in-your-face gay iconography in 1947. It still provides quite a bang 50 years later.

1953’s Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome (the 1966 “Sacred Mushroom Edition” is now the video release of record) is more like an MGM musical gone mad. By now, Anger had become a disciple of British occultist and bisexual visionary Aleister Crowley, and what hits the screen is a celebration of Crowley’s flamboyant Dionysian faux-religion: if Freemasonry had grown out of a pact between Timothy Leary and the surrealists, a documentary about one of their year-end orgies might have looked something like this. Luridly and beautifully photographed, Inauguration is triumphantly pushed past the jaw-dropping absurdity of its visionary agenda by a soundtrack based on the louder bits of Janácek’s Galgolitic Mass. (It’s a close thing, though—one can only imagine what Anger’s mid-70’s revision with a score by Electric Light Orchestra must have looked like.)

1963’s Scorpio Rising  is a series of closely observed and gleefully nasty field notes on biker culture set to popular songs of the day. It’s both Anger’s most exhilarating pants-down film, and the closest he ever came to a social statement—depending on how thoroughly you want to deconstruct the iconography, it’s about gay Christian Nazi bikers on a one-way road to death. Or maybe it’s America that’s on the road to the apocalypse: Anger has called it a “death-mirror held up to American culture... Thanatos in chrome, black leather and bursting jeans.”

He was never to make another film like it. (A similar project, Kustom Kar Kommandos, was abandoned for lack of funds.) On October 26, 1967, Anger took out a full-page obituary in the Village Voice which read: “In Memorium Kenneth Anger 1947-1967”. Unfortunately, it seems the man was right—films after Scorpio Rising show the observer turned evangelist. The most unfortunate example of this is Lucifer Rising, a project that had been in the works for decades and was finally released in 1981. By now the obsession with Crowley has lost even its camp value and the film itself—vaguely Egyptian types cavort around the statues of the Pharaohs—is a bore. Anger was at his best commenting on the death-force at the heart of the American Babylon he was born into and horrified by. His visions of a new occult age show us the filmmaker as a hobbled mystic—collateral damage of the Age of Aquarius.

There have been no new films from Anger in nearly two decades, and sadly, given the evidence of Lucifer, this may be no bad thing. It may be that he has found the good sense to shut up and try and leave us with an uncluttered view of his earlier work. There is still a lot of clutter in the Magick Lantern cycle, but not too much to get in the way of Fireworks, Inauguration and especially Scorpio Rising—a wonderful reminder that for half an hour in 1963, Kenneth Anger was the most watchable filmmaker in America.

—Published in the Globe and Mail. 1997