Filmmaker Paul Duane celebrates a controversial legend of avant-garde cinema...
The death of Kenneth Anger, aged 96, closes the book on a long, strange life whose details are often disputed (among other things, he claimed to have been a child actor in the 1935 film A Midsummer Night's Dream; the role was actually played by a young actress, Sheila Brown).
What can’t be disputed is his outsized influence on cinema and media in general.
An avant-garde filmmaker who never approached the mainstream, his 1963 film Scorpio Rising changed the world with its grainy 16mm images of homoerotic biker antics soundtracked by rock & pop records taken from scratchy 45s. The music’s raw energy excited the young Martin Scorsese who had been told in film school you could not possibly use pop music on a soundtrack. Of course, in 2023, the needle-drop is an essential part of the marketing of any new show or movie.
Watch: 72 hours in Chateau Marmont with Kenneth Anger (2018)
Anger didn’t benefit from his ground-breaking work. As someone once told me, pioneers get scalped, settlers make money. Anger was a pioneer but never got scalped, preferring to be the scalper via his frequent feuds with collaborator/lovers, film funders, biographers, pretty much anyone who was unwilling to do things his way.
Flamboyantly gay in 1950s America, his first film Fireworks, shot on a weekend when his parents were away, is stunningly ahead of its time and an incredibly confident statement for a 20-year old to make. His talent, brooding good looks and showmanship made him a cause celebre. His rich, influential friends included Alfred Kinsey and Mick Jagger, and he famously embraced the occult, idolising Aleister Crowley, 'the wickedest man in the world’, a title Anger would have undoubtedly loved for himself.
(Photo by Estate of Edmund Teske/Getty Images)
His own wickedness is hardly in doubt. He was egomaniacal, treacherous, unforgiving, prone to putting curses on his enemies. He cast his lover Bobby Beausoleil as ‘Lucifer’ in a long-gestating project, Lucifer Rising, then accused Beausoleil of stealing the film rushes from him. Beausoleil still insists it never happened, and Anger had spent the film’s budget with no results then used him as an scapegoat.
Whatever happened, Anger, true to his name, placed a curse on his ex, who was later arrested for the Charles Manson-related murder of Gary Hinman.
This cemented the filmmaker’s reputation as someone with dangerous connections and esoteric powers who it would be bad to cross. He later similarly cursed his unauthorised biographer, Bill Landis, whose early death at 48 many felt was not unconnected.
(Photo by George Lipman/Fairfax Media via Getty Images).
I met Anger briefly in London in 2009 after an onstage interview with ex-Blondie member, now occult writer, Gary Lachmann. The interview was rambling, Anger clearly showing his age, but afterwards I was surprised to find him standing outside the cinema happily signing books and posters for anyone who approached.
I’d brought my copy of his famously filthy and largely inaccurate book Hollywood Babylon with me so I joined the queue. When it was my turn, I told him I had been trying to make a drama based on Crowley’s magickal feud with WB Yeats. Wearing his trademark football jersey with ANGER spelled out on the front, he told me a very dubious story about Crowley’s attempts to become a screenwriter in 1920s Hollywood with a slapstick script called Spaghetti and Meatballs.
The anecdote was very Anger; charming, fascinating & impossible to verify. Maybe one of his comrades in the Crowleyan OTO sect had told him, or maybe he just made the whole thing up. I’ll never know.
His latter years were unproductive, only a couple of strange little films whose imagery mixed Mickey Mouse and the Hitler Youth to sinister but not particularly impressive effect. He was a creature of the 1960s & 70s, the 21st century seemed not to suit him.
A friend who plays piano for silent movie screenings in LA told me Anger was a regular. Whatever else about him, he never lost his love for the strange black-and-white fantasy world of old Hollywood.
Paul Duane's new film All You Need Is Death will be released later in 2023.
