Invocation of My Demon Brother (Kenneth Anger, 1969).
“The key of joy is disobedience.”
—Aleister Crowley
Lucifer has risen. Kenneth Anger is, terrestrially at least, no more. Of the Hollywood that once was, Kenneth Anger was one of the few unsentimental remnants—never nostalgic and always captivated by the present. He leaves behind an aura of gothic glam and a string of sacrilegious, unselfconscious films.
In the Bible, Lucifer—etymologically, “the light bearer”—was cast out of heaven for plotting against the supreme creator, that divine auteur. In Hollywood, Anger shed light on the ambrosial decadence that accompanied the rise of the film industry, whose mythological dimension he both captured and incarnated. To Anger, Hollywood was a sort of maternal womb, the amniotic element whose sinister luminescence he chiseled like a baroque sculptor. In his cinema, there is a visible adherence to the superficial gloss that made commercial films so profound. He was able to combine Hollywood’s aesthetic tropes with an avant-garde sensibility, paving the way for the cinematic rebellions to come. Yet his cinema was devoid of any antagonistic posturing; it only registers as scandalous in nature if measured against the puritanical sanctimony of the clerics of good taste. In the hands and gaze of one of the most candid directors to work in the aristocratic periphery of the “Dream Factory,” even the basest mortal desire could be transfigured into astral light.
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947).
The cinema’s Lucifer was born in 1927 in Santa Monica. His grandmother worked for Valentino as a costume designer, and silent film stars were to voluptuously haunt Anger’s ardor and imagination. Unlike most Tinseltown proselytes, Kenneth Anger did not go to Hollywood, but was born there, which may account for his ability to see beyond its illusions without becoming disillusioned in the process. Quite the contrary, his fascination with the metaphysical extravagance of the industry permeates every frame of his cinema, as well as the pages of his literary output. “For Hollywood the fabled ‘Golden Age’ was more like a lavish picnic on a shaky precipice,” he pondered in his book Hollywood Babylon, the apocryphal gospel of cinema according to St. Anger. Originally published in French in 1959 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the publisher of Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O, Hollywood Babylon originated as a column in Cahiers du cinéma, but was banned in the US when it was published there in 1965. American readers would have to wait another ten years to savor its tantalizing pages of gossip, sex, and death—the stuff dreams are made of. Demonized by the servile guardians of “truth” as factually inaccurate, Hollywood Babylon is in fact beyond good and evil, let alone beyond “reality,” and utterly devoid of any moralizing. As intoxicating as his description of the “cokey comedy” The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), starring “Doug Fairbanks as a bombed-out-of-his-skull detective,” Anger’s book is a biblical testament to the deranged grandiloquence of the “Dream Factory,” in all its criminal splendor.
The earliest of Anger’s films to survive, Fireworks (1947), is an autobiographical expulsion of the director’s inflammable desire, and is now considered a classic of gay experimental cinema. First screened at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, then a veritable temple for avant-garde filmmaking, Fireworks was subsequently acquired by Amos Vogel’s film society Cinema 16 for distribution. Influenced by Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1932), the film was awarded a prize at the Biarritz Festival du Film Maudit by the French poet himself. A dissatisfied dreamer (Anger) wakes up and goes out searching for a light for his allegorical cigarette, meets a group of sailors who beat him to the ground and rip open his chest, where a ticking clock lies in place of his heart. This scene—and the film overall—was inspired by Anger’s memories of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, a series of racist manhunts in which sailors terrorized the Los Angeles Latino community. The victims were stripped after being beaten, and the repressed homoeroticism of the violence seems to have meaningfully haunted the young Anger and the discovery of his own cinematographic sexuality. Oneirically charged by a sadomasochistic and gay imaginary, this emancipated film freezes in white light the (im)moral ambiguity of sexual desire. Attraction and repulsion, Eros and Thanatos, engage in a dialectical ballet of contradictory impulses, which the director, only twenty years old at the time, stages in a choreography of subconscious evocation. Angelic images of resplendent beauty are interspersed with sudden moments of violence, which rather than a counterpoint feel like parts of an integral whole. Desire and subjugation are twin drives.
After graduating from high school, Anger moved to Paris where, according to an interview given to the Los Angeles Times in 1989, he ended up working at the Cinémathèque Française for twelve years. It was there that, thanks to the good offices of Henri Langlois, his work became known to the likes of Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau. Bearing the influence of this period, Anger’s elemental cinema soon jumped from fire to the moon: Rabbit’s Moon (1950) typifies the director’s low budget cosmogony, his ability to plastically invoke the otherworldly. Filmed in Paris and, like Méliès, theatrical in its choreographic limitations, the film transcends its spatial restrictions to expand into a vision which feels indeed from another planet. Waterworks eventually followed Fireworks with Eaux d’artifice (1953). The film came about when Anger was granted access to the Renaissance-era Villa D’Este in Tivoli, whose fountains and ornamental basins the director films and edits into a symphony of liquid effulgence and movement. The conflicted carnality of Fireworks is here replaced by a sensual sinuosity, which the director allegorizes through the fluidity of water.
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963).
Anger’s claim to avant-gardist fame came with Scorpio Rising (1963), which, in its fascination with occult symbols and Nazi iconography, rekindled some of the themes from Fireworks for the incipient counterculture. The biker subculture, from The Wild One (1953) to Easy Rider (1969), symbolizes the political ambiguity that underpinned countercultural expression: its significance was uneasily suspended between youth rebellion, peace and love, and white supremacy. Just like in Fireworks, where the vertical ascent of sexual desire coexisted with the horizontal baseness of truculence, Scorpio Rising reverberates the rebellion of style along with the reactionary banality of racial hatred. The latter was not the exclusive and degenerative prerogative of Hell’s Angels, but a defining feature of life in California, a state where “eugenic forced sterilization continued until at least 1973.” It is worth remembering that Germany’s racial-hygiene laws were based on a Model Compulsory Sterilization Law developed in the United States. Perhaps, then, Scorpio Rising’s bikers are fundamental icons of the “American Way of Life,” deflating the counterculture’s naïve idealism.
A similar depiction of American values can be found in the car culture Anger slyly eulogized in Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970). Here the eugenic dream of perfection and purity is reflected in the shiny chrome surfaces of the cars, lovingly tended to by immaculate men whose sculpted bodies echo the stainless beauty of carburetors. A proto-Ballardian celebration of cars as sexual objects, Kustom Kar Kommandos is also a sublime example of Anger’s aesthetic fetishism, where visual pleasure is severed from narrative context and projected onto the very surface of the film’s images. With a very limited number of props, the director was able to create a self-contained universe, a world of concrete fiction possessed by the seduction of material culture. The latter is evoked by the pop soundtrack that envelops both films like candy wrappers, the music shiny and toxic in its flippant magnitude. Once again candor and horror emanate from the same aesthetic source, the plastic delight of pop. The pleasurable perversion of voyeurism, the literal basis of cinephilia, is in his films made palpable, synesthetically present. Anger’s love of old Hollywood memorabilia is tangible throughout his entire filmography: from Puce Moment (1949), an archaeology of the future that could be seamlessly edited into a punk movie from the late ’70s, to Mouse Heaven (2004), an elegiac necrology of Disney’s action figures and their ominous radiance.
Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1970).
Though it’s rarely remarked upon, Kenneth Anger’s cinema amounts to an accurate ethnography of Los Angeles: a city whose phantasmagoric decay he transfigured like no other. It is also in this specific regard that Anger’s influence on David Lynch makes sense, since the director of Mullholland Dr. has always insisted that his entire oeuvre is deeply realistic, even naturalistic. Both directors have captured the devious atmosphere that hovers over Los Angeles, its light a malignant fog, something so perceptible that even the most distracted visitor usually picks up on it. Hollywood branding has so successfully enshrouded Los Angeles’s purulence in a sanitized image that flattens out any nuances, doing injustice to its alluring depths.
Devoid of any realist pretense and yet so atmospherically genuine, the films of Kenneth Anger encapsulate what architectural critic Reyner Banham described as “the most basic and unlovely but vital drives of the urban psychology of Los Angeles.” A sprawling and unscrupulous profligacy of real-estate speculation, racial segregation, and lustful ambitions. A city where the occult is, counterintuitively, plain as day. Even at its most alchemical and expressionistic, like in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Anger’s cinema remains imbued in the esoteric darkness of Los Angeles, in its transcendental noir. The Hollywood of his films was still populated by the cosmopolitanism and allure of eastern Europe, which staved off the infantilizing urge to homologate the imaginary of the world. He was living and aesthetic proof that resistance and heterogeneity in the film industry are not only possible, but exquisite and critical.