In every obituary of the recently deceased influential American experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger there are a few things that cannot be verified. It immediately starts with his entrance into Hollywood, in his own words in the role of the ‘changeling prince’ in the film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream from 1935 by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. And true or not, he has always remained the changeling of Hollywood.
That’s how he described it in his legendary underground classic Hollywood Babylon (1959), first published in France and initially banned when released in the US because of the many scandals and sex scandals it had chronicled over the first fifty years of American film history. The main source for his stories was the memories of his grandmother Bertha and her friend Diggy who had worked various jobs on film sets and which in his childhood imagination grew into an image of Hollywood as an occult network of sinful excesses. The speculative gossip book (and a sequel published in the 1980s) laid a financial foundation for his film career and served as the inspiration for Damien Chazelle’s extravagant Hollywood epic Babylon from last year.
Homosexual themes
Californian Anger was one of the first openly gay directors in Hollywood and his first surviving film fireworks (1947) is full of gay themes and iconography. The short film is clearly influenced by French surrealism, and led to an invitation from Jean Cocteau to come to Paris, where he found work in the French cinematheque that was the beating heart of cinephilia and cinematic innovation in the 1950s.
Back in Los Angeles, Anger spun it is symbolically charged Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1966), in which writer and socialite Anaïs Nin can be seen as the lady with the birdcage on her head. The idea for the film came about when two actors threw a party where they asked everyone to come dressed as their worst nightmare.
Throughout his career, Anger developed his own mythology, in which the tarot philosophy of the British occultist Aleister Crowley played a central role. He surrounded himself with questionable friends such as Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and musician Bobby Beausoleil, a member of the Manson family. You could say his life was as controversial, colorful and eclectic as his films. And in any case, that both seamlessly merged.
His most famous film is without a doubt Scorpio Rising (1963), in which he poured his curious spice mix of pop culture, paganism, hyperaesthetics and homoeroticism into a story about an ultra-violent New York motorcycle gang. Partly thanks to that film, he is called the godfather of the queer film and the father of the music video. He was a major influence on directors as diverse as the serious Martin Scorsese and the campy John Waters.