ANGER ME
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

ANGER ME
Elio Gelmini, Canada, 2006, video, colour, sound, 72 min

The documentary Anger Me is the story of the life, literary and motion-picture accomplishments of Kenneth Anger, a pivotal figure in the history of experimental film. An innovator and a pioneer, he literally blazed his own trail. Considered to be one of the major personalities of the 1960s and 1970s underground art scene, Kenneth defined himself as a ‘cinematographic magician’ and his cinema as a ritualistic form. Anger’s films have taken audiences places where only great film poets can arrive. In 1947 in Los Angeles, while his parents were away, a young Kenneth took his family’s film camera and shot a short, dramatic film entitled Fireworks, which is now considered one of the seminal works of experimental film. Expressive, imagistic, sexually charged, and made with the help of friends (and apparently without a script), Fireworks brought to the screen an unconstrained vision and an almost unbelievable candor. Kenneth Anger also led in the field of visualization of homoerotic imagery. Fireworks was a film that went beyond maturity and sexual conscience – an extraordinary event considering that it was made in 1947. Kenneth did not cross over to commercial cinema. Throughout his career he has been completely devoted to uncompromising expression. Since the 1960s, Kenneth Anger’s films have been the subject of many books, film panels and film theory courses. Although he has never made a commercial music video, he has even been called the ‘Godfather of MTV’.

Kenneth Anger: The Man, the Filmmaker, and the Author

Many things have been said and written about Kenneth Anger, however, meeting the man only serves to add greater mystery to his reputation. He seems to disdain casual conversation, but when asked a question about his past or his work, he comes alive, as though he is an actor who just heard the word ‘action’. Kenneth Anger seems to have very little interest in his place in history – film history, literary history, homosexual history or otherwise. As Anger himself likes to put it: ‘I just made Kenneth Anger films’. Kenneth Anger is particularly well known for his films Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1970-81). He is less known as an author. In 1959, primarily to make money, Kenneth Anger published the first of a ‘tell-all’ series of books entitled ‘Hollywood Babylon’. His objective was to demonstrate the theory that Hollywood is a relentless machine, always ready to swallow and destroy whomever oversteps allowed boundaries in the search of fame, glory and celebrity.

Anger’s filmmaking style

Anger’s films incorporate the stylistic and expressive techniques of film masters such as Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith. Carel Rowe offers the following thoughts on how Kenneth Anger inherited and put into practice the lessons of the great Russian master, Eisenstein: “The importance of Anger’s use of Eisensteinian principle is that it is not reduced to a craft, a trick in time, but maintained as an artistic vision. Art comes from the filmmaker’s reassembling of the splinters of time and space with the inclusion of the intellectual, psychological, or emotional content of the event. The collision of two separate images creates a third distinct impression to the viewer. Similarly, the blending of two dissimilar images into one accumulative essence yields a poetically metaphoric statement on that which is portrayed. This is the artistic importance of Eisenstein’s theory. Its potential is rarely realized in film, and even more rarely as true to theory as in Anger’s films.”

Influences on future generations of filmmakers

Anger’s film Fireworks is considered by many to be the starting point for the only movie ever made by Jean Genet, Un Chant d’Amour (1950). In Paris, Jean Cocteau, who had been much affected by Fireworks in the 1950s, called Mr. Anger and gave him permission to make a movie of his ballet, ‘Le Jeune Homme et la Mort’. Although Kenneth Anger approached many producers with Cocteau’s letter, none of them were interested, as all of Cocteau’s films had lost money. Contemporaries like Stan Brakhage, and Harry Smith were influenced by and expanded upon Kenneth Anger’s approach in what was known as the ‘underground’. Later on, this ‘underground’ influenced Martin Scorsese, the contemporary mainstream exponent of this expressionistic style, who openly acknowledges Kenneth Anger’s influence on his film technique.

Cinema as ‘magick’ and ritualistic form

Kenneth Anger has always defined himself as a ‘cinematographic magician’ and declared that his intention was that of projecting his films directly into the minds of the audience. Anger further credits the use of esoteric symbolism, prevalent in his films, to Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the great magician, advocate of Gnosticism and neo-paganism. Crowley was a highly controversial, complex and fascinating figure of the 20th Century. Anger also consistently referenced the French poets Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), the initiators of European Symbolism.

Aleister Crowley – Céfalù, Italy

Kenneth Anger was greatly influenced by the writings of Aleister Crowley, who lived for three years in Céfalù, in an 18th Century farmhouse, which he called the Abbey of Thelema. It was there that he put into practice the principles of his neo-pagan religion, essentially ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. On May 1, 1923, Crowley, already a notorious figure, was expelled from Italy by the order of Mussolini’s police after an accidental death on the site. Anger himself visited Céfalù years later and documented what was left of the paintings and objects.

(Elio Gelmini)

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