MAGICK & SHAMANISM
Wednesday 28 October 1998, at 8:45pm
London Barbican Cinema

Though they made very different kinds of films, Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith were both concerned with the use of Magick and alchemy and ways that these mystical forces could be represented in cinema.

Kenneth Anger is a legendary figure of the avant-garde. From his first widely released film Fireworks (1947) through to his last completed film Lucifer Rising (1980) he has built up a formidable collection of work that is usually presented as a total whole in the Magick Lantern Cycle. Anger grew up in the 1930s immersed in the myths of Hollywood. His grandmother was a wardrobe mistress and arranged for the 5-year-old Kenneth to play the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Two years later, Anger claims to have made his first film Ferdinand The Bull (1937). Six more films were completed during his childhood though only two – Escape Episode (1944-46) and Drastic Demise (1945) – are known to have been exhibited publicly. Fireworks was made when he was only 17 and it was to become a landmark in the development of the personal film. (Anger: “A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out into the night seeking a light and is drawn through the needle’s eye”). In 1949 he began Puce Women which was intended as a feature depicting the lives of faded Hollywood starlets. It became the first of a series of uncompleted films, and only a fragment has been exhibited as Puce Moment (1949-70). The next year Anger moved to Paris and started to shoot La Lune Des Lapins (1950/72), a ritual in which he first investigated the idea of cinema as an instrument of Magick, but he soon ran out of money. Robert Haller noted in 1980 that had Anger had the finances to complete the film Pierrot would have got lost in the woods, discovered a metro station and found an infinite series of images of the moon (“Eclipse” shoe polish posters) stretching into the darkness. In the early 1970s Anger rediscovered and edited the surviving footage, but the definitive version usually presented today as Rabbit’s Moon is 7 minutes long, has music by Andy Arthur, and was released in 1979. The longer 1972 version with a pop music soundtrack has only recently been returned into limited distribution.

LA LUNE DES LAPINS
Kenneth Anger, USA-France, 1950/72, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min

“Pierrot is the poet reaching for the unattainable. The moon is his mama and woman and illusion ill met by moonlight. Harlequin is the cruel jester, the trickster with his slapstick. Other people’s tragedies make us laugh. The huckster of invisible wares and the magic lantern. My art. Columbine is full of grace and teasing malice and prettily mocks the poet and his moon. The rabbit is my soul. Thus before the concluding shot of Pierrot’s fall from the sky, the entire film preceding is a flashback – dying’s memory of the adolescent’s life experience – what I know of life up to that time. And cutting the film is what I have learned since.” (Kenneth Anger in a letter to Stan Brakhage, reprinted in Film Culture #67-68-69, 1979)

Harry Smith is another legendary character who has built up a substantial mythology. He was born in 1923 and has variously claimed to have been the son of an alchemist, the offspring of Aleister Crowley or a descendent of Princess Anastasia. It seems sure that his paternal grandfather was in fact a prominent Mason. By the age of 15 Harry was already developing an interest in anthropology and spent time on reservations recording the songs and rituals of Native Americans. Throughout his lifetime he built an immense collection of field recordings of many varieties. In 1952 he used his extensive knowledge of folk music to compile the multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by the Folkways label. Harry received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammy’s in 1991 in recognition of his work in this area. He always considered himself primarily an anthropologist, then a painter and that his films were minor accessories to his paintings, referring to them as “cinematic excretia”. Unfortunately most of his paintings were destroyed, though thankfully the films survive. His earliest known film probably dates from 1946 and was hand-painted on 35mm. The Early Abstractions (1946-57) are highly hallucinatory animations that have appeared at various times with soundtracks of jazz, the Fugs, the Beatles and Teiji Ito. Early Abstractions (No. 7) (1951) consists of optically printed Pythagorean shapes made under the influence of cocaine and ups. (Harry Smith had a lifelong voracious appetite for all kinds of stimulants.)

EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (NO. 7)
Harry Smith, USA, 1951, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“One of the masterpieces of non-objective cinema, the soft luminescence of the re-photographed images reminds us continually that we are watching a movie of a movie, like reflections in parallel mirrors, opening the aggressively flat screen into a conceptual infinity.” (from William Moritz’ essay The Non-Objective Film: The Second Generation, in the book Film As Film, 1979)

Marie Menken went to Alhambra with Kenneth Anger, and he became her first homosexual friend who was not a lover of her husband Willard Maas. Arabesque For Kenneth Anger (1961) is a fine example of her unique portrait style. One year earlier, Stan Brakhage had also made a film featuring Anger – The Dead (1960) was shot at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER
Marie Menken, USA, 1961, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min

“She saw a quality in Kenneth Anger that was intrinsically Moorish, and she felt there must be some strain running through him that went back to the makers of this Alhambra. So it seemed to her, an affinity of feelings between Kenneth and these ancient grounds. She had an extraordinary grace, and with this grace and this camera in hand, as a tourist, first just taking pictures of the Alhambra, like any tourist might, she opens herself up to the deep feelings of love as friendship.” (Stan Brakhage speaks on Marie Menken at the Innis Film Society, 1992, reprinted in Film Culture #78, 1994)

Harry Smith’s eight and ninth films were collages that are no longer extant. Mirror Animations (No. 11) is a refined version of No. 10 cut to Thelonius Monk’s track Mysterioso. Both are hermetic representations of mystic symbols from different mythologies unexpectedly combined with inexorable logic.

MIRROR ANIMATIONS (NO. 11)
Harry Smith, USA, 1962-76, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min

“If, (as many suppose), the unseen world is the real world and the world of our senses but the transient symbols of the eternal unseen, and limiting ourselves to the aesthetic experience’s well-known predilection for the eyes and ears, we could logically propose that any one projection of a film is variant from any other. This is particularly true of Mirror Animations. Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the nonexistence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularly the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein’s Ethics And Aesthetics Are One And The Same, in the light of H.C. Agrippa’s earlier “there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means’ have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse form originally envisioned. I hope you like it.” (Harry Smith, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

No. 12 (also known as The Magic Feature or Heaven And Earth Magic) is Harry Smith’s most ambitious and difficult animation. It exists today in a black-and-white hour long version, though during his lifetime Smith presented it with a special projector, colour filters and masking slides that transformed the shape of the screen. The film is an American Book of the Dead which Smith claimed to take place in a fold in the brain called the fissure of Silvius. The Magic Mushroom People of Oz (No. 13) was intended as a three hour film of animation and live photography funded by a wealthy heir named Harry Phipps. Thousands of dollars were spent employing a team of animators but only a fragment of footage survives as part of The Tin-Woodsman’s Dream (No. 16) which was photographed through a specially constructed teleidoscope. Late Superimpositions (No. 14) was shot as a study for Mahoganny (No. 18), an uncompleted four screen film that was Harry’s final cinematic project. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Harry Smith spent time pursuing many interests and it is only now that true stories are appearing to show the depth of his knowledge. He has been described as the world’s leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world; he had immense collections of Seminole textiles, Ukrainian decorative eggs, antiquarian books on the occult, and the largest known paper airplane collection in the world; and was an expert in ancient languages and dialects. He spent his last years as Shaman In Residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado at the invitation of Allen Ginsberg, and died at the Chelsea Hotel, New York in 1991.

LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS (NO. 14)
Harry Smith, USA, 1964, 16mm, colour, sound, 31 min

“Superimposed photographs of Mr. Fleischman’s butchers shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Andarko, Oklahoma – with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise not a very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahoganny. For those who are interested in such things: No. 1 to 5 were made under pot; No. 6 with schmeck (it made the sun shine) and ups; No. 7 with cocaine and ups; No. 8 to 12 with almost anything, but mainly depravation, and 13 with green pills from Max Jacobson, pink pills from Tim Leary, and vodka; No. 14 with vodka and Italian Swiss white port.” (Harry Smith, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #3, 1965)

After failing to complete La Lune Des Lapins, Kenneth Anger was also forced to abandon productions of Cocteau’s Le Jeune Homme et La Mort and Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror before travelling to Italy to make Eaux d’Artifice, a romantic portrait of a figure moving through the gardens and fountains of the Villa D’Este in Tivoli. The film was shot in black-and-white and printed through a blue filter and Anger hand tinted the lady’s fan for each print, occasionally changing the colour. Back in California, he made Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954), the legend of Bacchus told through a Magick ceremony that clearly shows Anger’s dedication to Aleister Crowley. The film has been presented in various forms with music either by Harry Partch, Janacek or the Electric Light Orchestra. Today it is usually shown in the Sacred Mushroom Edition (Lord Shiva’s Dream) from 1966. Anger returned to Paris to write the original Hollywood Babylon book and lived there until 1961 when he moved back to the USA. It was while staying with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in New York, 1962, that he made the acquaintance of a Brooklyn biker gang and a hustler called Bruce Byron, and set out to make Scorpio Rising (1963), probably the best known underground movie of all. This elaborately constructed mock-heroic view of urban youth culture set to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack is Anger’s most successful film. He subsequently began a companion piece focusing on hot rod customisers, but Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) only exists as a 4 minute fragment. Anger then began to concentrate on his magnum opus Lucifer Rising in 1966. After the first Lucifer, a five-year-old boy, killed himself trying to fly off a roof, he was replaced by Bobby Beausoleil, who was a member of the Manson Family and later convicted of the La Cienega murders. In September 1967 the original Lucifer Rising footage was due to be shown at the Equinox Of The Gods, a benefit ritual to raise money for the film, but the film cans were stolen (allegedly by Beausoleil who is said to have buried them in Death Valley). Distraught, Anger announced his retirement from filmmaking in a full page obituary in the Village Voice newspaper and then appeared at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative where burned he his entire filmic output from before Fireworks. Two years later he combined what was left of the original Lucifer Rising with other imagery, including footage of himself performing the Equinox Of The Gods ritual shot by filmmaker Ben Van Meter. Adding a Moog synthesiser soundtrack by Mick Jagger (a new candidate for the starring role as Lucifer), Kenneth Anger made his most intense film – Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969).

INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
Kenneth Anger, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min

“The shadowing forth of Our Lord Lucifer, as the Powers of Darkness gather at a midnight mass. The dance of the Magus widdershins around the Swirling Spiral Force, the solar swastika, until the Bringer of Light – Lucifer – breaks through. “The true Magick of Horus requires the passionate union of opposites” (Aleister Crowley)”. (Synopsis by Kenneth Anger, 1969)

But Lucifer Rising did not go away. In 1970, Anger moved to London to court the interest of the Rolling Stones camp. A legendary photo session for a magazine feature took place in his basement flat in Hampstead – Chris Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper and Alexandro Jodorowsky were all present. After completing eight minutes of film Anger was awarded a grant from the BFI and flew his cast to Germany and Egypt for location shoots. Jimmy Page was enlisted to compose a soundtrack but the first version of the film was shown silent (in 1973) at an eventful in-person appearance with Stan Brakhage in Boulder, Colorado. For the next few years the incomplete film was presented with soundtracks either by the Alternative Enlightenment System or Jimmy Page, and sometimes Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother album. The 1975 publication of the American Hollywood Babylon book brought Anger more widespread notoriety and royalties vital to the completion of his ongoing epic. A year later, after falling out with Jimmy Page, it was announced that the original Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, would compose and record the definitive Lucifer Rising soundtrack from behind bars at Tracy Prison. The fully realised version of Lucifer Rising was Anger’s last completed film and it finally appeared in 1980. A second volume of the Hollywood Babylon book was published in 1984, and between 1987 and 1989 he worked on Mouse Heaven, a fantastical collage starring Mickey Mouse. Every so often stories emerge of Anger’s own feature length version of Hollywood Babylon, and there have recently been rumours that he is working on a film of Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass.

LUCIFER RISING
Kenneth Anger, USA, 1970-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 31 min

“Like Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising is about several things. I’m an artist working in Light, and that’s my whole interest, really. Lucifer is the Light God, not the devil, that’s a Christian Slander. The devil is always other people’s gods. Lucifer has appeared in other of my films; I haven’t labelled him as such but there s usually a figure or a moment in those films which is my “Lucifer” moment … I’m showing actual ceremonies in the film; what is performed in front of the camera won’t be a re-enactment and the purpose will be to make Lucifer rise. It’s the birthday party for the Aquarian Age … Everything I’ve been saying so far has been leading up to this happening in the world today. His message is that the Key of Joy is Disobedience.” (Kenneth Anger talks about the first version of Lucifer Rising in Friends #14, 1970)

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