If You Do Nothing Else Today, Watch 28 Minute Long Scorpio Rising
A couple days ago, I got an invitation from an old friend, Harper Simon to attend an art show for the rollout of his new project, book and album, Meditations on Crime, at Acid Free Book Fair at Blum + Poe Gallery. The invitation said it would include a special edition limited box with vinyl LP and art book with art, essays and music by Cindy Sherman, Raymond Pettibon, Julian Schnabel, Freeman and Lowe, Miranda July, Laurie Anderson, Gang Gang Dance, Julia Holter, King Khan, Wayne Kramer, Ariel Pink, Jerry Stahl, the late Kenneth Anger and myself and so many more. Several of those artists are people I know and whose work I’m always interested in. But none stood out more than Kenneth Anger and the words “the late.” I had no idea that the filmmaker who made me aware that someone made those movies I was watching had died a month ago.
He had no family and died, age 96, at an assisted living center next to Joshua Tree National Park. Had I known he was there, I would have gone to visit him. I love Joshua Tree and there was always something about Kenneth Anger’s work that I felt a foundational connection to. “Foundational?” Yeah, it’s one of the works that helped me define myself, right up there with Dostoevsky, Bob Dylan, John Rechy, the Rolling Stones, Jean Genet… This is the film that hooked me, Scorpio Rising:
He made it in NYC 1963, eventually calling it “a death mirror held up to American culture... Thanatos in chrome, black leather, and bursting jeans.” It debuted at the Gramercy Arts Theater on October 29, 1963. I just just 15. It was released, under the rubric “experimental film” and “homoerotic film,” a year later. A theater showing it in California was sued for obscenity, and in L.A. there were protests by the American Nazi Party (which also sued Anger)— presumably for inappropriately appropriating their symbols and icons. The Lutheran Church also sued Anger. By the time the California Supreme Court overturned the obscenity conviction, I was on my way to college where I became chairman of the Student Activities Board, which put on concerts, lectures and showed films.
Sandy Pearlman brought me to see experimental films in The City. I had never heard of that scene. We saw Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Jonas Mekas’ The Brig, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch and every one of Andy Warhol’s films at venues like the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, the Bleeker Street Cinema and the Museum of Modern Art. And, of course Scorpio Rising and an older Anger film called Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome plus a kind of mini-Scorpio Rising called Kustom Kar Kommandos. I liked Anger’s stuff the best— the interplay between imagery and the music back then just blew my mind. It made an indelible impression on me, that foundational thing I mentioned above. And that he was a young American following his muse to live abroad made a profound impression on me... and opened a world of possibilities. When we met, I felt my life begin... this fool rushed in.
So, of course, I brought these films to Stony Brook for the students to see. The programs were free but I don’t remember more than 20 or maybe 30 students ever going to see any of them— mostly just me and my friends and few film buffs. There was always grumbling that I was wasting student money— but not like the kind of fury that concerts by artists like The Doors, The Fugs and Jimi Hendrix engendered, where the right-wing squares were really offended and angry. The underground films they never saw so they couldn’t flip out over them the way they did about The Doors show, when they tried to impeach me, or The Fugs show when the captain of the basketball team threatened to beat me up.
After college I pretty much lost track of Anger, other than noting his huge success with the gossipy book Hollywood Babylon and another film, the Rolling Stones-adjacent Lucifer Rising. In 1992, I was working at Sire Records and an English band called Scorpio Rising was making some waves in London. Seymour Stein signed them and we released two albums, a compilation of their UK stuff, Zodiac Killers and a new one called Pig Symphony but I barely remember either. I'm positive the band member’s connection to Kenneth Anger and his work was more apparent to them than it was to me.
I missed the NY Times obituary by Dennis Lim on May 24. He wrote that “Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground art and mass culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers borrowed so liberally or so subversively from popular iconography. And with his sensuous, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, perhaps none saw their work so readily absorbed back into the mainstream.” He noted that in the “fetishistic” Scorpio Rising Anger “proved that sound and image could be combined to create something more potent than the sum of their parts. It is widely considered a precursor of the music video, and its influence can be felt in movies as varied as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
Anger’s reputation as a filmmaker rested on a relatively small body of work: nine short, wordless films, totaling under three hours and made between 1947 and 1972, that came to be known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, like Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), were fragments of longer works that were never finished for lack of money. Anger often abandoned and restarted projects, and he sometimes revised his films and presented slightly modified versions of them.
Her was intrigued by the the interplay of ancient myths and pop culture. Several of his films simultaneously portray and enact rituals, using sound and editing to create trancelike, incantatory works, such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), which depicts a party whose guests are dressed as pagan deities. Anger likened the making of a movie to the casting of a spell.
…Anger’s earliest surviving film, Fireworks (1947), made when he was 20, is a cinematic landmark in both form and content: a dreamlike psychodrama and an autobiographical coming-out movie, shot in his parents’ house while they were away for a funeral. Anger appears in it as a young man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of musclebound sailors, one of whom undoes his pants to reveal a Roman candle.
According to Anger, the guests at the film’s first screening included Alfred Kinsey, who he said bought a print of Fireworks for his collection, and the filmmaker James Whale, best known for Frankenstein. In 1950, encouraged by an admiring letter from Jean Cocteau about Fireworks, Anger moved to Paris, where he spent much of the following decade and worked as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.
Anger completed one film during his time in Europe: Eaux d’Artifice (1953), shot in the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. The footage for another, Rabbit’s Moon, which features characters from the commedia dell’arte theater tradition, was left in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française for two decades; two versions of the film were released in the 1970s.
He shot Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome while on a visit home to Los Angeles. With financing hard to come by, he supported himself by writing Hollywood Babylon.
Back in the United States in the 1960s, Anger entered a productive phase that resulted in some of his most admired works. Scorpio Rising, one of the best-known experimental movies of all time, shows leather-clad bikers tending to their motorcycles, fueling a raucous Halloween party and desecrating a church. Anger included provocative juxtapositions: Nazi imagery and excerpts from a life-of-Jesus movie.
The manager of a Los Angeles theater that showed Scorpio Rising, which contains frontal nudity, was arrested on an obscenity charge, and an indecency case against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in Anger’s favor.
As the counterculture movement crested in the mid-1960s, Anger moved to San Francisco, where his associates included Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who became a member of the so-called Manson family.
Anger spent much of this period developing and shooting a project called Lucifer Rising, which envisioned Lucifer not as the devil but as a god of light and “the patron saint of movies,” as Anger put it. A disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, Anger referred to cinema as an “evil force.” He had the name Lucifer tattooed on his chest.
Much of the original footage of Lucifer Rising was said to be lost— Anger accused Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it— but some salvaged material made its way into the orgiastic Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), which features a synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.
Completed in 1972 and revised several times, Lucifer Rising, with its theme of rebirth, stands in contrast to Anger’s death-obsessed work of the previous decade. Beausoleil, by then serving a life sentence for murder, wrote the score from prison.
The film concluded the Magick Lantern Cycle, and afterward Anger withdrew almost entirely from filmmaking for about 20 years. He published Hollywood Babylon II in 1984, but this was otherwise a period of relative inactivity for Anger, though it coincided with the arrival of the music video and the rise of quick-fire editing in mainstream cinema, and he came to be recognized for his influence on both.
Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Anger’s volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Friendships and collaborations were known to end with Anger threatening to put a curse on the offending party, as happened with Beausoleil and the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was originally hired to produce the Lucifer Rising score.
Writing for RogerEbert.com a week after Anger’s death, Scout Tafoya noted that “Anger didn’t make a single movie between Lucifer Rising and Don’t Smoke That Cigarette in 1999. When interviewed for a PBS special about his life and art, he told the interviewer he was so broke he had to sell his air conditioner. He had written a sequel to Hollywood Babylon in 1984, but the response wasn’t as great. As with many provocateurs, including Waters and Andy Warhol, who Anger despised, staying relevant can become very difficult once your art has broken boundaries and changed tastes. Anger didn’t quite manage, aging into a slightly more benevolent version of the acidic hell-raiser he so gleefully played for decades… Anger was one of the most singular American artists of the 20th century. If he had stopped after Scorpio Rising or had only made Fireworks, he would still be in textbooks. But he lived a life as wild, woolly, fast, sensuous, and dangerous as any of his movies. A film by Anger promised heat, dirt, leather, glimmering surfaces, the devil winning a battle with God, sex and brutality, and hidden messages to the faithful who could be right beside you in the theatre. Anger spoke to a cultural niche that became greater than he could have imagined. He created a world of satanic rituals and sexual release splitting out of leather onto the hood of a speeding car. It was little wonder a man like that, who hardly seemed capable of keeping his soul inside his body, could not find a permanent place in our world except as an idea, a suggestion, the promise of something deeply, deliciously wrong.”