If Kenneth Anger understood anything, it was that cinema was the ultimate ritual of an otherworldly realm. Anger, avant-garde and experimental filmmaker, actor, quasi-Hollywood occultist and seer and author of Hollywood Babylon (1959), plumbed the depths of humanity’s dark side – and the film medium’s potential to make both angels and demons. The director died Sunday, May 11 of natural causes in Yucca Valley, Calif., at an assisted living facility. He was 96 years old.
Born in 1927 in Santa Monica, Anger often struggled to finance his films, some were made over long periods of time and not released or completed until years after their initial production began. Anger was a bit of a myth maker of himself, with some of his biographical details difficult to corroborate. Rubbing shoulders with Jean Cocteau, Alfred Kinsey and James Whale helped to flesh out his charismatic and cinephile character. From his first known short ‘Fireworks’ in 1947 (the then 20-year-old made it while his parents were away for the weekend) to his ode to musician Elliott Smith, ‘Elliott’s Suicide’ (2007 ), the manipulation of mythology was central to Anger’s fascinations. The hulking figures of power and their sexy, homoerotic and corrupt underpinnings were, for Anger, worth exploring and exploiting – sometimes simultaneously, as in his revelatory Hollywood Babylonwhich film historian Karina Longworth has called “an elaborate Hollywood phone game”.
These pieces of iconography—whether images of sailors, men in uniform, or boys wearing leather to emulate their bedside idols seen in Method’s acting yards and major movie theaters— floated freely through the crop and had his large flock on their knees. But Anger was one of the few who knew how to channel the ecumenical effect of Hollywood and pop culture on people.
His films like “Scorpio Rising” (1963), “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965) and “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969) laid bare the links between worship and consumption. Fueled by pop songs of the era and featuring imagery that quickly shifts from the mundane to the hypnotic and disturbing (mechanics, motorcycles, the cool glint of an exhaust pipe), Anger captured the elemental way in which folklore was created from the simplest ingredients. They were pumped and blown on a large, larger-than-life screen so they were like a god. Or maybe closer to a fallen angel.
“Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts,” he once said. joked. And while this kind of occult fascination permeates much of Anger’s work, including “Lucifer Rising” (1980) and “Rabbit’s Moon” (1971), Anger’s inclination to link the dark sides of worship, humanity, and Hollywood stood out because of his uncanny closeness to this hell. For the openly gay filmmaker, there was titillation and excitement at the danger of these mythologies of white masculinity, these gargantuan titans and demigods. Marlon Brando and James Dean were not of this land, and the contradictions of Hollywood Babylon paints for him, even by totally unethical “reportage” methods, a battle of good and evil. Of course, evil is always a bit more fun and tempting.
The seduction of evil was perhaps the high point of Anger’s work, a paradoxical invitation and warning. The brutal and shocking turns of some of his films to reveal their (or their?) fixation on fascist imagery – leather, eagles, swastikas – are both provocation and revelation. Anger dared to point out that the roots of our favorite ways of praying in pop culture were not that far removed from the iconography of fascism itself.
Anger’s films could turn any place into a house of worship and a den of iniquity – places like the Cinema Theater in Los Angeles, whose director Michael Getz was accused with obscenity in 1964 for showing “Scorpio Rising”, or art galleries like Spruth Magerwhose exposure Icons toured in Berlin, London and Los Angeles in 2013.
While it is difficult to engage with Anger’s work due to his racial and social politics, it is also worth remembering that Anger fundamentally invented a language of queer desire – a language based on a level of exclusion and fetishization and on the deconstruction of dominant ways of desiring. Considered transgressive for its frankness and its confrontation at a time when gay and LGBTQ+ art was coded or remained underground, it innovated a grammar for those who did not necessarily listen. The same techniques he employed to critique and question these forms of idolatry were swallowed up and incorporated into the vernacular of cinema without much research. Even as Anger spoke to us about the dangers of worship as he explained the pleasures, all we could do was close our eyes and pray for self-forgetfulness.
