Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rise1963, 35 mm, color, sound, 28 minutes. Kenneth Anger.
KENNETH ANGER was a daring filmmaker, a self-proclaimed mage, a never shut-in queer, a shameless scandalmonger, a satanist at times, a difficult person and, as P. Adams Sitney put it, “the conscious craftsman of his own myth”. He was also the King of Pop, or so I thought when I first saw him. Scorpio Rise in the mid-1960s, at the age of sixteen, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
There were other films on this program; I remember being impressed by Gregory Markopoulos ming green and Ed Emshwiller Relativity. But Scorpio Rise blew away everything else: Kodachrome enamel color on Kodachrome, tongue-in-cheek sacrilege, comic book quotes and Mad magazine, but especially the music. Scorpio Rise was wall-to-wall AM radio, all but one of its twelve songs were in the Top 40 between May 1962 and September 1963, the exact time in college when I was getting nightly transmissions of Murray the K’s “Swingin’ Soiree.” didn’t necessarily like the songs, but I knew them in my bones.
The most adventurous members of the art world didn’t need to meet the Beatles or even the Supremes to make it to the Top 40. People like Tony Conrad, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ivan Karp and Wynn Chamberlain ventured to downtown Brooklyn to enjoy the fantastic shows of Murray the K at the 4,000-seat Fox Theater. (Years before Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the K was unfolding on the strobe!) Anger, however, was the first to put teenage goon music into a movie.
His fate sealed by the generational horror of american graffiti, Scorpio inevitably become nostalgic. Now that “My Boyfriend’s Back” has given a Sandy Duncan vehicle its title, “Hit the Road Jack” has been used to sell car insurance, and Whoopi Goldberg has covered “I Will Follow Him” in sister act, that is ancient history. But the point for me, in the mid-1960s, was not recognition but revelation: sound and image, the “radical juxtaposition” of Susan Sontag! (Not before having seen 1967 by Godard Two or three things I know about her a few years later, I would understand the essence of editing so viscerally.) The music got things moving. The sight of clueless rapping types getting into biker pick up while Bobby Vinton hummed “she wore blue velvet” or Jesus walking into frame while the Crystals sang “He’s a Rebel” made me laugh. Do again.
Anger is a central figure in my sense of film history. (Having discovered the original paperback Hollywood Babylon in a thrift magazine store in Times Square, I put it in memory with that of Andrew Sarris American cinema.) He reliably slotted into the margins of cinema. The once scandalous Fireworks (1947) could serve as a short subject, if not an inspiration, to Cocteau Orpheus (1950); the unfinished Moment chip (1949) is the real one sunset boulevard. Inauguration of the Dome of Pleasure (1954) is a perverse riff on 1950s Bible shows; Kustom Kar controls (1965) should precede each review of Easy Rider (1969), to name just one of the films that crawled from below Scorpiothe leather jacket. Nothing gets the madness of the late 60s more convincingly than Summon My Demon Brother (1969) or the rise of total animation in a more entertaining way than Anger’s end of life, rarely seen The mouse paradise (2004).
Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rise1963, 35 mm, color, sound, 28 minutes.
A legendary figure in avant-garde film circles, Anger returned to the United States in 1962 after a decade spent in Paris, settling in New York, where he stayed in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas. “It was like visiting a foreign country,” he later recalled. “Brooklyn was as strange to me as the darkest Africa.” While cruising the boardwalk at Coney Island, he discovered a gang of bikers hanging out near the Cyclone and was inspired to make a documentary portrait. (They accepted it like a camera maniac.)
With its deceptively heroic take on urban youth culture, familiar with homoeroticism, numerous media quotes and the blasphemous juxtaposition of Hitler and Christ, Scorpio Rise (1963) was an instant sensation. Jonas Mekas called it “poisonously sensual” and, having lived as a youth under German occupation, saw something more: “The attraction of fascist might, muscle, steel and speed”. Fun fact: the same night as Scorpio Rise had its “preview” at 2 a.m. Andy Warhol screened the first episode of his “series” Kiss. It also materialized a few months after that other deranged document of depravity, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
Smith and Anger were different types. Anger collected memorabilia from Rudolph Valentino; Smith adored Maria Montez. Anger viewed his films as burnished jewels; Smith proudly used the trash. Although a postcard of Anger was discovered in Smith’s “archives,” it’s hard to imagine them being geniuses together for more than five minutes. (I note in passing that neither of the two divo had the courage to put the irrepressible Taylor Mead in a film.) If Flaming Creatures was the most influential underground film, Scorpio Rise was the most popular.*
Both films drew inspiration from Hollywood, pop music and drag. Both were steeped in subculture. The two were arrested days apart, on opposite coasts, for the same thing – male frontal nudity, pretty much in your face. Anger, who was not lacking in humor, would claim that he was being sued by the American Nazi Party for having desecrated the swastika! Speaking of phallocratic fascism, I’d like to see wannabe Mussolini ruling Florida attempt to analyze Anger’s legendary claim that the only devil he ever worshiped was Mickey Mouse.
J. Hoberman think again about the 1960s. . .
*I worked at the Cooperative des Cinéastes during the summer of 1970, cleaning films and sending them to the post office: there were something like twelve copies of Scorpio Rise in constant demand from college film companies and Madison Avenue advertising agencies. (Michael Snow Wave length ranked second, with six draws.)
