Kenneth Anger, a child of Hollywood who became one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation and whose influence can still be felt in popular visual culture from films to music videos, passed away on May 11. in Yucca Valley, California, a town adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. He turned 96.
His death, in a residential care home, was confirmed on Wednesday by Spencer Glesby, a spokesperson for Sprüth Magers, a gallery that has represented Mr Anger since 2009. estate were put in order.
mr. Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground art and mass culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers have borrowed so liberally or so subversively from popular iconography. And with its sensual, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, perhaps no one saw their work re-enter the mainstream so easily.
The most famous movie of Mr. Anger, “Scorpio Rising” (1963), a fetishistic take on a Brooklyn gang of bikers with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop hits — sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles and Little Peggy, among others, March proved that sound and image could be combined to create something more powerful than the sum of its parts. It is widely regarded as a precursor to the music video and its influence can be felt in films as varied as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”. (Bobby Vinton’s hit song that gave the Lynch movie its title can also be heard in “Scorpio Rising.”)
Hailed in his later years as a forerunner of remix culture, Mr. Anger prided himself on being an outsider who did not belong to any particular movement. Asked in 2004 about his status as the godfather of queer cinema, he replied, “I don’t like being pigeonholed.”
He felt comfortable in the company of the celebrities. His acquaintances, some of whom worked with him, included the poet and artist Jean Cocteau, the playwright Tennessee Williams, the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the writer Anaïs Nin, and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
But he also scandalized the celebs in his lurid tell-all book “Hollywood Babylon.” That book, riddled with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino — Mr. Anger’s grandmother was a silent movie wardrobe mistress — was first published in France in 1959 and widely bootlegged before it became official. published in the United States in 1959. 1975.
The reputation of Mr. Anger as a filmmaker rested on a relatively small body of work: nine short, wordless films, less than three hours in all, made between 1947 and 1972, which came to be known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, such as “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965), were fragments of longer works that were never completed due to lack of funds. Mr. Anger often stopped and restarted projects, and sometimes revised his films and presented slightly modified versions of them.
He was intrigued by the interplay of ancient myths and pop culture. Several of his films simultaneously act out and perform rituals, using sound and editing to create trance-like, incantatory works, such as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), which depicts a party whose guests are in costume like pagan gods. Mr. Anger compared making a movie to casting a spell.
Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer was born on February 3, 1927 in Santa Monica, California, to Wilbur and Lillian (Coler) Anglemyer. His father was an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft. Many details of his biography as he told it – like the scandalous stories in ‘Hollywood Babylon’ – are difficult to confirm. (He claimed to have played the role of the young prince in the 1935 film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” although Mickey Rooney, a star of the film, said the part was played by a girl.) He said he started making as a child.
Anger’s earliest surviving film, “Fireworks” (1947), made when he was 20, is a landmark film in both form and content: a dreamy psychodrama and autobiographical coming-out film shot at his parents’ home while they were in prison. away for a funeral. Mr. Anger appears in it as a young man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of muscular sailors, one of whom unbuttons his pants to reveal a Roman candle.
According to Mr. Anger, guests at the first screening of the film 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 on ‘Fireworks’, Mr. Anger moved to Paris, where he spent much of the next decade working as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.
Mr. Anger completed one film during his stay in Europe: “Eaux d’Artifice” (1953), shot in the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. The statues for another, “Rabbit’s Moon”, featuring characters from the commedia dell’arte theatrical tradition, remained 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 visiting Los Angeles. Since it was difficult to get financing, he supported himself by writing ‘Hollywood Babylon’.
Back in the United States in the 1960s, Mr. Anger entered a prolific phase that resulted in some of his most admired works. “Scorpio Rising,” one of the most famous experimental films of all time, features leather-clad bikers tending to their motorcycles, sparking a raucous Halloween party and desecrating a church. mr. Anger added provocative juxtapositions: Nazi images and fragments from a film about the life of Jesus.
The manager of a Los Angeles theater showing “Scorpio Rising,” which featured frontal nudity, was arrested on obscenity charges, and an indecency suit against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Mr. Anger decided.
When the counterculture movement reached its peak in the mid-1960s, Mr. Anger to San Francisco, where he met Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who became a member of the so-called Manson family.
Mr. Anger spent much of this period developing and shooting a project called “Lucifer Rising”, which portrayed Lucifer not as the devil, but as a god of light and “the patron saint of movies”, as Mr. Anger put it. Mr. Anger, a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, called cinema an “evil force.” He had the name Lucifer tattooed on his chest.
Much of the original “Lucifer Rising” footage is said to have been lost – Mr. Anger accused Mr. Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it – but some salvaged material found its way into the orgiastic “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969), with a synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.
Completed in 1972 and revised several times, “Lucifer Rising” contrasts Mr. Anger’s death-obsessed work of the previous decade with its theme of rebirth. Mr. Beausoleil, then serving a life sentence for murder, wrote the score from prison.
The movie concluded the Magick Lantern Cycle, and then Mr. Anger withdrew almost completely from filmmaking for about 20 years. He published ‘Hollywood Babylon II’ in 1984, but this was otherwise a period of relative inactivity for Mr. Anger, though it coincided with the advent of the music video and the rise of fast-paced editing in mainstream cinema, and he is recognized for his influence on both.
Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Mr. Anger’s volatility is the subject of many an anecdote. Friendships and collaborations were known to end with Mr. Anger threatening to curse the offending party, as happened to Mr. Beausoleil and the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was originally hired to produce the “Lucifer Rising” score.
Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, producing a series of short films, including “Mouse Heaven” (2004), about the cult of Mickey Mouse; “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007), a dirge on singer Elliott Smith; and I want!” (2008), a short film compiled from archive footage of the Hitler Youth movement. Critical response to the new work was generally lukewarm, and the focus remained on his earlier films. The Magick Lantern works have been released on DVD in restored versions and installed in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.
Mr. Anger left no immediate survivors. Before moving into assisted living, he lived in Los Angeles.
In an essay for a 2007 DVD release, Martin Scorsese praised the poetic rhythms of Mr. Anger and what he called their “inevitable” logic.
“The structure, the form, the feel of these films,” Scorsese wrote, “seem to be less fabricated than received from a source hidden from the rest of us.”
Alex Traub reporting contributed.