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Kenneth Anger (1927 - )
Anger attended the Maurice Kossloff Dancing School, with Shirley Temple, and later attended Hollywood High School, counting future stars like John Derek among his classmates and friends. Kenneth Anger's start in films came with his appearance in Max Reinhardt's 1934 rendition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, when he played the little Indian prince under the care and protection of Queen Titania of the Fairies. At the age of eleven Anger made his own first movie, a silent version of Ferdinand the Bull. This was followed four years later by Who's Been Rocking My Dreamboat, which featured many of his classmates. Around this same time, Anger became aware of his own gayness, and also to study the writings of Aleister Crowley and other occult and magickal texts. In 1947 he made his first professional film, Fireworks, in one weekend, creating a work replete with homoerotic and sadomasochistic elements, including Roman candles in the shape of phalluses and a scene suggestive of tearoom sex. The movie was scandalous to say the least, and attacked by many as perverse and pornographic. Critics in Europe, particularly Jean Cocteau, were far more receptive and praising of the work, and Anger took this as a cue to relocate to Paris, where he spent the next twelve years. Here he filmed Eaux d'Artfice in 1953, a surreal work which featured a dwarf in a Marie Antoinette costume dancing among the Tivoli Fountains. In 1955, Anger journeyed to Sicily where he filmed Crowley's Abbey of Thelema and uncovered several of Crowley's murals, which had been painted over by local inhabitants after Crowley and his disciples had been asked to leave by the Mussolini government. He also began but never finished a film adaptation of The Story of O, the notorious account of a woman's journey through the dark world of sado-masochistic sex. Kenneth Anger began to come into his own as a maker of surrealist films in 1958 with his Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, an homage to the works of Aleister Crowley which featured costumed players performing magickal rituals. The cast included Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, former lover and assistant to Jack Parsons, playing the same role Parsons had conferred upon her in their magickal workings, Babalon, the Scarlet Woman. Anger eventually returned to the US, settling for a time in Brooklyn, which he described as "strange to me as darkest Africa." While here he composed his most famous filmwork, Scorpio Rising, a portrait of the biker sub-culture which juxtaposed its machismo and violence with its supressed homoeroticism. A well-chosen rock music soundtrack drove the latter element forward, as when the words "she wore blue velvet" are heard as a biker clothes himself in ultra-macho leather drag. Premiering in 1963, Scorpio Rising was banned in many venues, which merely enhanced its status as an underground classic and its success as a cult movie. Moving to California in 1965, Anger planned to make a film about the hot rod sub-culture but abandoned it in favor of a new, psychedelic version of Pleasure Dome, dubbed "The Magic Mushroom Edition." Around this same time he became a member of Anton LaVey's Magic Circle in San Francisco, and his familiarity with Thelemic magick proved invaluable to LaVey when organizing his system of modern Satanism and the Church of Satan, of which Anger was a founding member. His recognition and popularity as an underground filmmaker had by now made him the center of a circle of friends which included Anais Nin, Marianne Faithfull, and Mick Jagger. At the same time that LaVey's church was starting up in 1966, Anger began work on his dream project, Lucifer Rising, a cinematic ode to the dawning of Crowley's New Aeon and LaVey's Satanic Age, but the central footage for the film was stolen. What remained was released in 1969 as Invocation of My Demon Brother, and in a twenty-five minute version, Lucifer Rising, Part 1, in 1973. In 1975, Hollywood Babylon, which had first been published in France in 1960, made its first American appearance. Prefaced with Aleister Crowley's quote, "Every man and woman is a star," the book was a record of the most outrageous scandals from the early years of Hollywood, delivered in Anger's bitingly bitchy style. This was followed in 1980 by Hollywood Babylon II, which covered Hollywood scandals through the 1960s. Anger later attributed problems with the IRS to his sending of a gift copy to First Lady Nancy Reagan at the White House with certain sections underlined. A new version of Pleasure Dome, with a new soundtrack by Electric Light Orchestra, came out in 1978, and a new and more complete version of Lucifer Rising appeared in 1980. A proposed Hollywood Babylon III never materialized, largely because of legal concerns on the part of the publishers. Financial troubles forced Anger to sell the rights for Hollywood Babylon II for a television documentary, with which he was quick to voice dissatisfaction. Kenneth Anger currently lives in Los Angeles. At this writing he is working on a film of Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass, in collaboration with the Ordo Templi Orientis. Links: Kenneth Anger Magick Lantern Cycle The Third Degree with Kenneth Anger Shergood Forest: Kenneth Anger Internet Movie Database - Kenneth Anger
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