By Christopher Frey
The cultural legacy of Kenneth Anger could not be more of a mixed bag. A giddy purveyor of early Tinseltown sleaze and scandal through his bestselling Hollywood Babylon books; the prototypical rootless bohemian, always in the midst of the most happening scene at the time, from post-war Paris and La Dolce Vita-era Rome, to psychedelic San Francisco; neo-pagan proselytizer and admirer of Aleister Crowley; pioneering experimental filmmaker.
Even if Hollywood Babylon whetted the appetite for glam gossip in which our media now wallows, it’s his influence as a director that has proved the most profound. With a mere handful of imagistic shorts, Anger’s technical and aesthetic innovations have helped shape the visual language of today’s mainstream films, music videos and commercials.
The 76-year-old eminence grise of the avant-garde, appears in person this Tuesday at the Bloor Cinema for a retrospective of his films and the screening of Anger Me, a new documentary by Torontonian Elio Gelmini about his life.
Eschewing conventional narrative, Anger composed personal dreamscapes rife with sexual and mythical symbolism, employing garish colour schemes, elaborate tableaux, and double-printing that enabled him to layer images over one another. In Scorpio Rising (1964), Anger juxtaposes images of a Brooklyn “motorcycle death cult” with scenes recycled from a Christian educational film on the life of Jesus; it also marked the first time a director used popular music as soundtrack. Along with Bruce Connor and Stan Brakhage, his work provided the foundation for American avant-garde cinema of the sixties and seventies.
While he may be the seam that stitches together so much of the last century’s counterculture art-a friend of the Rolling Stones, it’s claimed he inspired “Sympathy for the Devil”—his influence today is decidedly aboveground. It’s there in the way Martin Scorsese uses music and religious iconography, how John Waters conflates kitsch with high art, and in the Freudian image-games of David Lynch.
The documentary Anger Me is an intimate portrait in the subject’s own words, as Anger ruminates on the development of his art-he describes himself as a “film poet” and emphasizes the connection between ritualistic magic and art-dishes about many of his famous friends, and explains his oft-misunderstood interest in the occult.
Despite leaving a few moral panics in his wake-including a landmark obscenity trial over Scorpio Rising, the publication of Hollywood Babylon—Anger surprisingly comes across as a rather genteel provocateur in the documentary. Read any recent interview with him, however, and you’ll discover a man with a witty temper and vituperous distaste for the world today (he calls television a “vampire of time,” loathes the politicking of today’s Hollywood stars, and believes we’ve entered a new Dark Ages). Perhaps we can look forward to that kind of Anger in person.
+++
For your enjoyment here’s a clip from Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
