{"id":1357,"date":"2006-10-29T19:00:30","date_gmt":"2006-10-29T19:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1357"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:55:57","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:55:57","slug":"anger-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2006\/10\/29\/anger-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Anger Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

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ANGER ME
\nSunday 29 October 2006, at 7pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elio Gelmini, <\/strong>Anger Me, Canada, 2006, 72 min
\n<\/strong>A portrait of Kenneth Anger, legendary pioneer of independent film-making. Raised in Hollywood, a spell as the Changeling Prince in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> (1935) provided his first taste of the fantasy world of the movies. The nine films Anger made between 1947 and 1980 are shown together as the \u2018Magick Lantern Cycle\u2019, emphasising his belief in cinema as magical weapon. An authority on Aleister Crowley, his dazzling montage invokes myth and ritual, exploring taboo subjects and popular culture with a complex iconography. From the homoerotic fantasy Fireworks<\/em> to the transcendental Lucifer Rising<\/em>, his influence reaches beyond the avant-garde and into the mainstream, touching the work of Jarman, Lynch, Scorsese and countless others. Anger\u2019s fascination with film history, memorabilia and scandal eventually led to the bestseller Hollywood Babylon<\/em>, a dark expos\u00e9 of Tinseltown\u2019s seamy side. He inadvertently invented the music video with Scorpio Rising<\/em>, and his acquaintances ranged from Ana\u00efs Nin and Alfred Kinsey to the Rolling Stones. Anger Me<\/em> takes the form of an extended monologue, in which this visionary artist talks at length about his extraordinary life and remarkable body of work.<\/p>\n

Also Screening: Friday 27 October 2006, at 1:45pm, London NFT2<\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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ANGER ME
\n<\/strong>Sunday 29 October 2006, at 7pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3<\/p>\n

ANGER ME
\nElio Gelmini, Canada, 2006, video, colour, sound, 72 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

The documentary Anger Me<\/em> 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 \u2018cinematographic magician\u2019 and his cinema as a ritualistic form. Anger\u2019s 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\u2019s film camera and shot a short, dramatic film entitled Fireworks<\/em>, 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<\/em> 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<\/em> was a film that went beyond maturity and sexual conscience \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2018Godfather of MTV\u2019.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Anger: The Man, the Filmmaker, and the Author<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2018action\u2019. Kenneth Anger seems to have very little interest in his place in history \u2013 film history, literary history, homosexual history or otherwise. As Anger himself likes to put it: \u2018I just made Kenneth Anger films\u2019. Kenneth Anger is particularly well known for his films Fireworks<\/em> (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome <\/em>(1954), Scorpio Rising<\/em> (1963) and Lucifer Rising<\/em> (1970-81). He is less known as an author. In 1959, primarily to make money, Kenneth Anger published the first of a \u2018tell-all\u2019 series of books entitled \u2018Hollywood Babylon\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

Anger\u2019s filmmaking style<\/em><\/p>\n

Anger\u2019s 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: \u201cThe importance of Anger\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s theory. Its potential is rarely realized in film, and even more rarely as true to theory as in Anger\u2019s films.\u201d<\/p>\n

Influences on future generations of filmmakers<\/em><\/p>\n

Anger\u2019s film Fireworks<\/em> is considered by many to be the starting point for the only movie ever made by Jean Genet, Un Chant d\u2019Amour<\/em> (1950). In Paris, Jean Cocteau, who had been much affected by Fireworks<\/em> in the 1950s, called Mr. Anger and gave him permission to make a movie of his ballet, \u2018Le Jeune Homme et la Mort\u2019. Although Kenneth Anger approached many producers with Cocteau\u2019s letter, none of them were interested, as all of Cocteau\u2019s films had lost money. Contemporaries like Stan Brakhage, and Harry Smith were influenced by and expanded upon Kenneth Anger\u2019s approach in what was known as the \u2018underground\u2019. Later on, this \u2018underground\u2019 influenced Martin Scorsese, the contemporary mainstream exponent of this expressionistic style, who openly acknowledges Kenneth Anger\u2019s influence on his film technique.<\/p>\n

Cinema as \u2018magick\u2019 and ritualistic form<\/em><\/p>\n

Kenneth Anger has always defined himself as a \u2018cinematographic magician\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Aleister Crowley – C\u00e9fal\u00f9, Italy<\/em><\/p>\n

Kenneth Anger was greatly influenced by the writings of Aleister Crowley, who lived for three years in C\u00e9fal\u00f9, 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 \u2018Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law\u2019. On May 1, 1923, Crowley, already a notorious figure, was expelled from Italy by the order of Mussolini\u2019s police after an accidental death on the site. Anger himself visited C\u00e9fal\u00f9 years later and documented what was left of the paintings and objects.<\/p>\n

(Elio Gelmini)<\/p>\n

Back to top<\/a><\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2006","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}