Unlike most filmmakers identified as avant-garde or experimental,Kenneth
Anger never seems to have assumed that his filmmaking would be a marginal
enterprise. Growing up in Hollywood, Anger was surrounded by the
film industry during one of its most halcyon decades and from time to time
was part of the excitement: at the age of four, he played the Changeling
Prince in the Max Reinhardt–William Dieterle adaptation of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1935). He was making his own films by the age of seven,
and ten years later, when it had become clear to Anger that the films he
wanted to make would be seen only by American film society audiences, he
moved to Europe, where his work seemed more fully appreciated: he was
introduced to the French film scene by Henri Langlois and worked as Langlois’s
assistant at the Cinémathèque Française for years. Even in Europe,
funding for his projects was di‹cult to find. Anger worked when he could
and supported himself by writing a legendary history of Hollywood scandal,
Hollywood Babylon (published first in a French edition in 1959 and subsequently
in English editions, in 1975 and 1981),which was followed in 1984
by Hollywood Babylon 2.
Anger’s first seven films appear to be lost, but Fireworks (1947), his earliest
extant film, is a landmark in at least two senses. Along with Maya Deren
and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Sidney Peterson’s
The Lead Shoes (1949), it helped to define what has come to be known
as the psychodrama: a film that uses symbolic action and detail to dramatize
a disturbed state of mind, usually the filmmaker’s own. The particular
disturbance dramatized in Fireworks is Anger’s recognition of his powerful
sexual desire for other men within a thoroughly heterosexist American society.
Indeed, one of the film’s most memorable images—of Anger lighting a
firecracker phallus sticking out of his pants and achieving an orgasm of
sparks—is easily read as Anger’s declaration of independence from America’s
repression of homosexuality and of film history’s, and especially Hollywood’s,
complicity in this repression. Fireworks is not just a landmark in
what has come to be called Queer cinema; it is, so far as I am aware, the first
openly gay American movie. In retrospect what seems especially poignant
about the film is its good humor: for Anger, being gay—even “coming out”
in Fireworks—is less a trauma than a psychosexual inevitability that must
be faced with the same high spirits, the same whistling-in-the-dark humor,
as other aspects of maturation.
During the nearly sixty years since Fireworks was finished, Anger’s career
has been frustrated by frequent financial setbacks—the projects he
envisions are remarkably inexpensive by commercial standards but more
expensive than most avant-garde films—but the films he has found ways to
complete are distinctive and memorable, often gorgeous and thrilling. And
they are consistently evocative of Anger’s spiritual quest to use cinema as
a means of acknowledging, honoring, and participating in those many spiritual
traditions that have been suppressed by the evolution of modern so-
Kenneth Anger in Fireworks (1947). Courtesy David E. James.
ciety. In the exquisite Eaux d’artifice (1953) Anger depicts the gardens of
the Villa d’Este, in the Alban Hills east of Rome, particularly the elaborate
system of fountains designed by Pirro Ligorio. He not only brings the mythological
sculptures spouting water to life but also creates an incarnation of
the spirit of the garden: a tiny woman (Carmilla Salvatorelli), who appears
from a fountain, inhabits the enchanted space and finally dissolves back into
a fountain. In Rabbit’s Moon (1950), Harlequin uses a magic lantern to create
the spirit of Columbine,who as usual frustrates Pierrot, in Anger’s homage
to the commedia dell’arte.
In Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), still his longest and in some
ways most elaborate film, Anger introduces a protagonist, Lord Shiva
(Samson De Brier), who reveals within himself a multitude of spiritual entities
from various religious traditions—Osiris, Isis, Pan, Astarte, Lilith, the
Great Beast, the Scarlet Woman—and even one of the crucial spirits of early
film history: Cesare, the Somnabulist, from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of
Doctor Caligari (1919). For Anger cinema is, and always has been, a form
of ritualized experience that oªers the opportunity for entering imaginative
worlds and for creating new worlds where entities from diverse geographies
and histories can commingle and celebrate their spiritual power.
Like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Lucifer Rising (1980) evokes spirits
from several mythological traditions—Egyptian, Celtic, biblical—who
communicate with each other across time and space, reminding us that underneath
the conventional surface of our lives lie forces that inform our experience,
even though we may be unaware of them, and that these forces,
like the volcano we see in Lucifer Rising, can at any moment burst forth and
alter whatever world we thought we were living in. Aleister Crowley and his
teachings seem to have been crucial for Anger during much of his career.
Crowley is invoked literally by means of a superimposed photograph in Inauguration
of the Pleasure Dome and implicitly in Inauguration and Lucifer
Rising, both of which were at least partially inspired by Crowley’s famous
rituals in which people assumed the identities of gods and goddesses.
Anger’s best-known and most widely influential film, Scorpio Rising
(1963), is a depiction/interpretation of a motorcycle gang, foregrounding the
spiritual dimensions of young men’s fascination with their bikes and the biker
life, as these are revealed in their preparations for a raucous Halloween party
and for the final motorcycle race of the year. Anger’s inventive use of pop
music in conjunction with, and as an ironic comment on, the activities revealed
in his visuals have caused Scorpio Rising to be understood as one of
the progenitors of the music video (along with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray
[1962], which was completed the year before Scorpio Rising). While Anger
has never finished a film with dialogue, he has always taken his sound tracks
very seriously, working inventively and precisely with a wide range of music:
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons in Eaux d’artifice, Janácek’s Glagolithic Mass in
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, American pop songs in Scorpio Rising
and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Mick Jagger’s Moog synthesizer track
in Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and, in the case of Lucifer Rising,
a sound track composed in prison by Anger’s friend (and for a brief, unfortunate
moment, Charles Manson groupie), Bobby Beausoleil.
Although his work since 1980 has received little attention, Anger remains
active, presenting earlier films and working on new projects, including the
recent The Man We Want to Hang (2002), a documentation of a show of
Aleister Crowley’s artwork in London in 1995; and Mouse Heaven (2004),
a brilliant, high-spirited rumination on the early Mickey Mouse, using a collection
of pre-Fantasia (1940) Mickey Mouse toys and memorabilia. Mouse
Heaven must be numbered among Anger’s finest films.
I spoke with Anger in his apartment in Echo Park, Los Angeles, in March
2004 and subsequently by phone.
MacDonald: What do you remember about the LA independent film
scene in the forties, and how did you get involved?
Anger: I got involved after I had made some films that I wanted to show
in public. I think the first film I showed publicly was Escape Episode in 1946,
the year before I made Fireworks, and then I showed Fireworks at the Coronet
Film Society at the Coronet Theater—it was a new theater at the time—
on La Cienega here in LA. Later I took Escape Episode to San Francisco,
where there was already a small group of filmmakers—Frank Stauªacher,
James Broughton, Jordan Belson—beginning to show independent work at
the Art in Cinema Film Society at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
MacDonald: I understand that at some point you and Curtis Harrington
had a small distribution eªort.
Anger: Yes, it was called Creative Film Associates. It was basically just
Curtis and me, though we involved a few other people, like the Whitney brothers
and Jordan Belson, who donated prints. We made these prints available
for rental and sent out brochures. Creative Film Associates lasted about a
year and a half. The prints were rented by colleges and film societies.
MacDonald: Was there a demand? Did it work as a small business?
Anger: On a very small scale, yes. I gave it up when I moved to Europe
in 1950, and Curtis didn’t express any interest in continuing it on his own.
MacDonald: I’ve heard that there was even a phantom secretary.
Anger: Yes. Curtis and I thought her up. Her name was Violet Parks.We
didn’t do any telephone orders, so she didn’t need to speak.We bought some
violet ink and Curtis signed for her. She was our phantom lady.
MacDonald: You were making films very young, and by the time of Es-
cape Episode you had a body of work. It’s surprising to me that you got so
much work done so young.
Anger: Well, they were all short films. The longest, Escape Episode, was
a half hour, but most of them were five or ten minutes. Fireworks was fifteen.
MacDonald: You told Robert Haller that it was no great loss that most
of those early films no longer exist.
Anger: I don’t remember saying that!
MacDonald: How did those films get lost?
Anger: I lived like a gypsy. I’ve been moving constantly most of my life,
and when you’re moving constantly, it’s very hard to hold on to a lot of things.
Sometimes you store things with friends and come back a year later, and they
don’t know what happened to the stuª. This place [Anger’s apartment in the
Echo Park area of LA] is basically just where I store my paper archives.
Some things seem to have disappeared even rather recently. I left a box
of my material with Anthology Film Archives in New York, including some
of my early films, and when I went back, the box had disappeared. They
think it may turn up, but the box wasn’t kept under lock and key, and I think
someone may have appropriated it.
MacDonald: Are your films being preserved?
Anger: At the moment UCLA is graciously allowing me to keep my masters
in their cold vault, in the former Technicolor Building.
MacDonald: Fireworks is the earliest of your films still available. I teach
it almost every year, and my students are always astonished, as am I, not
just at the continuing power of the film, but that, in 1947, as a seventeenyear-
old, you had the courage to make it.
Anger:Well, everything just fell into place. I didn’t think it was particularly
courageous; it was just something I wanted to do, and so I did it.
Of course, later, when I tried to get Fireworks printed, it almost got
confiscated at Consolidated Film Lab here in Hollywood. At that time there
were very few big labs that did negative-positive printing in 16mm. In fact,
there are fewer and fewer now; it’s almost like 16mm is on the way out. But
at that time I went to Consolidated, and it turned out that the head of the
lab was a navy veteran, and he looked at the negative and found it had some
people in naval uniforms in it. He was considering calling the FBI, as if Fireworks
were some subversive thing. One of the lab technicians there told me
later that he had saved it by telling the head of the lab, “Oh, it’s just some
little film; it’s of no importance—don’t bother with it!”
MacDonald: I think what strikes those of us who see it as courageous is
that it’s the first film, at least the first I’m aware of, where a man openly,
clearly expresses a desire for other men. I grew up in that postwar period—
I’m a little younger than you are, but I remember the era—and there was
so much repression . . .
Anger: As I said, it’s just something I wanted to do, and I did it. I suppose
in retrospect you can put a badge of courage on it, but I don’t necessarily
choose to think of it that way—though I suppose it was reckless.
MacDonald: It has a great sense of humor, a whistling-in-the-dark kind
of humor, which still works wonderfully.
Anger: Yes. Thank you. If you don’t catch the humor of the film, you really
miss the point.
MacDonald: A general question: You’re regularly cited, along with Jack
Smith and Jean Genet, as one of the fathers of what’s now called Queer Cinema.
I wonder how you feel about being thought of that way.
Anger: I consider myself an individual artist, and I don’t like being put
in a cubbyhole. There’s nothing I’ve ever hidden; I’ve always been very upfront
about myself. I can respect what other filmmakers are doing, but I don’t
think we need to be put into a category.
I knew Jack Smith and in fact spent a day in Oakland with him, looking
for a prop for one of his movies—I think it was called Normal Love [1963].
He wanted a little morning-glory gramophone, the kind with the big tin
horn, and we finally found a bent-up one in a junk shop, but it was more
than he could aªord. Jack always liked to get everything for nothing. So
finally, just so it wouldn’t be a wasted day, I bought him a rusty Buck Rogers
ray gun for a dollar. Later I saw the unfinished footage of Normal Love, and
the ray gun was in it. Jack left a lot of unedited material; he didn’t seem to
like to finish things.
But I’ve never identified either with him—I mean in a group way—or
with John Waters or anyone else.
MacDonald: Sitney describes an auditory prologue that was on early versions
of Fireworks. At what point did you remove the introduction?
Anger: I still have a print with it on. It was my voice over a black screen,
rather than an introductory main title. It was very short: it says something
like, “In Fireworks are released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. The
inflammable desires ignited at night . . .” and so forth—rather purple language.
The last sentence is, “These imaginary displays provide a temporary
release.” I took the introduction oª when my films were being released by
Canyon; it seemed more practical to have a copyright title at the beginning.
MacDonald: You made Fireworks on a single weekend?
Anger: In seventy-two hours. I had a “window of opportunity,” as they
say nowadays, to turn my house into a movie studio because my parents
were absent, which was rare. They had gone back to Pittsburgh to attend
the funeral of an uncle.
MacDonald: What did your parents do? I know very little about your
background.
Anger: I was the third child, and there was a lapse of about eight years
Kenneth Anger 21
between me and my older brother and sister. I was the tail end of the family.
The member of the family I was closest to was my maternal grandmother,
who had worked in costumes in the silent era. She told me a lot of stories
about Valentino and Clara Bow and sparked my interest in the silent period.
She bought me my first 16mm camera, as a birthday present. It was a
used Bell & Howell. It had seen some war service; those handheld Bell &
Howells were used by cameramen during the war.
MacDonald: Was your family supportive of your filmmaking?
Anger: They didn’t know too much about it. My grandmother did see
Fireworks—it was made with the camera she gave me—and she had one
word to say: “Terrific!” Considering that she was a lady approaching her
eighties, I think that was quite remarkable. But my family wasn’t particularly
supportive of what I was doing. I had to make my own way.
My father was an engineer at Douglas Aircraft. My older brother went
into aviation, and I was expected to. I could have gone to Cal Tech, if I had
been so inclined; they would have paid for it, but I declined. I wanted to be
an artist, and only my grandmother supported me in this. She had made
her money in real estate, back in the twenties, and had retired by the time
she was part of my life. She was a landscape painter and the president of
Women Painters of the West, a plein air school of landscape painting. I used
to go with her to various places that she liked to paint, like when the wildflowers
were in bloom in the spring. There used to be magnificent stretches
of California that were covered with wildflowers for a brief period, and I
would go with her and carry her easel; it was very pleasant.
MacDonald: What do you remember about the early screenings of
Fireworks?
Anger: That first screening at the Coronet Film Society was at midnight,
after the regular screenings. To my surprise, there was an audience, including
some rather remarkable celebrities who just happened to show up: James
Whale, for example, the director of Frankenstein [1931] and other wonderful
films. Later, we became friends. And Robert Florey, another very interesting
maverick Hollywood director,was there. And Dr. Alfred Kinsey came.
He was on the West Coast doing interviews. Dr. Kinsey came up and spoke
to me afterward and said he’d like to interview me; he oªered to buy a print
of Fireworks for the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in
Bloomington. Now it’s called the Kinsey Institute.
MacDonald: How did these guys know to be at this screening?
Anger: Kinsey apparently heard on the grapevine,which he was very good
at listening into, that this screening was going to happen and that Fireworks
was an unusual film that he should see. There had been some publicity for
the event. I was very pleased to meet Dr. Kinsey, and later I went downtown
to the Biltmore Hotel, where he was staying, to do the famous Kin-
22 A Critical Cinema 5
sey interview. My statistics are part of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
which came out in 1948.
MacDonald: Did Fireworks have censorship trouble?
Anger: No, because it was shown in so few places, and in a very discreet
way. And when it was made available for rental, I had no particular problem:
I assumed that the fact that it came back in one piece meant that the
showing had gone well, wherever it was shown.
MacDonald: Sitney talks about Fireworks as one of the early psychodramas.
At what point were you seeing films by other people who were also
moving into the mind as an environment to explore?
Anger: Well, Curtis Harrington made a short called Fragment of Seeking
[1946] at about the same time; it’s a kind of psychodrama. Curtis was
coming to terms with the homosexual issue in his own way, which was more
oblique than mine. And at the same time, Gregory Markopoulos was beginning
to make films.
Back in the forties, when there were very few of us working, I was certainly
encouraged by the example of Maya Deren: she made her films with
very limited means on 16mm, and they were very consciously works of art.
I thought it was very daring of her to have her films silent; she wanted them
silent. Meshes of the Afternoon was conceived as a silent film. Of course, she
had a very good collaborator, her husband, Alexander Hammid, who was
an excellent photographer, so her films always had a professional polish to
them. We never met; we did exchange a couple of letters.
In 1949 I heard there was going to be a festival in Biarritz, called Le Festival
du Films Maudit (the Festival of Damned Films)—films that had had
trouble with censorship or used subject matter that some people might want
to condemn. So I wrapped up a print of Fireworks and mailed it airmail to
the address I had in Biarritz, not knowing if they’d show it or even if I’d
ever get the print back. Fireworks was awarded the prize for poetic film. The
head of the jury was Cocteau, and he sent me a letter, a handwritten letter,
with his signature and a hand-drawn pentagram—his way of saying how
much he liked it. I decided at that point that I should go to Europe, where
I seemed to be appreciated more than I was in the States, and meet Cocteau.
And in 1950 I moved to Paris. Fortunately, I was oªered a job by Henri Langlois,
the head of the Cinémathèque Française.
MacDonald: How did the job come about?
Anger: Henri had a reception for me in Paris and showed Fireworks. He
had invited Jean Genet and Cocteau. And he decided to hire me to be his
assistant at the Cinémathèque Française. “Hire me” should be in quotes,
because I wasn’t paid but was housed and fed (of course, Langlois loved
eating in the best restaurants, so I ate very well—the beginning of a lifetime
of aªection for French cuisine). I moved in with Mary Meerson (Lazare
Kenneth Anger 23
Meerson, her late husband, had been René Clair’s set designer in his early
films) and Henri; they had a guest room in an apartment overlooking the
Parc Monsouris. The apartment had been designed by Lazare Meerson; it
was a wonderful Moderne design. I guess you’d call it art deco today. I had
a wonderful relationship with Mary Meerson and Henri Langlois that lasted
for about twelve years while I was working there. Then I started to travel
again.
MacDonald: You mentioned that Genet was at the Parisian screening of
Fireworks. What was his response?
Anger:Well, I believe I understood him to say that he found it “fascinante.”
I arrived in France speaking French, and I couldn’t have gotten along as
well otherwise. I went to Beverly Hills High School and took French. I was
motivated and got As. I’m sure I had an American accent, but I knew my
basic grammar, and I could speak French and I certainly could hear it. At
the time, we had a theater here in LA, called the Esquire, which specialized
in foreign films with subtitles. There was always an audience for European
film in Hollywood, especially French films. I would go to these French films,
which included Cocteau—as I remember, they had Blood of a Poet [1930]
and films made in France during the occupation and afterward, like The
Eternal Return [1943, directed by Jean Delannoy] and Un Carnet de bal
[1937], a beautiful film by Julien Duvuvier, which was very popular.
I would go more than once to these films, or I would stay and see them
again and again (in those days you would pay your admission, and you could
stay and see a movie twice or three times if you wanted to). The first time,
I would watch a film the usual way; the second time, I would just listen to
it: so I had some very famous French actors, like Arletty and Jean-Louis
Barrault, teaching me French pronunciation. By the time I arrived in France
in 1950, I’d already seen things like Children of Paradise [1946, directed by
Marcel Carné] and all those films, felt familiar with them, and could talk
about them.
MacDonald: What kinds of projects did you do at the Cinémathèque?
Anger: Langlois was having a festival in the town of Antibes on the Riviera,
and he invited me to take the various films that had been made from
Eisenstein’s aborted Mexican project, Que Viva Mexico!, and recut them
more in the order specified in Eisenstein’s script. So I reassembled the material
in Thunder over Mexico, Death Day in Mexico, plus a couple of travelogues
that had been made from Que Viva Mexico! after Eisenstein was removed
from the project by the producer, Upton Sinclair. It was fascinating
to work with Eisenstein’s material and to see how certain ideas that were in
the script were not reflected in any of the films. For example, he had a sequence
that began on Death Day starting before dawn; dawn slowly comes,
and the scenes get brighter and brighter, and then when it’s full light you
have this fiesta on the graves, which is a Mexican tradition; they eat candy
skulls and things like that. That was a fascinating project.
MacDonald: What filmmaking were you doing?
Anger: It was through the Cinémathèque that I was able to make Rabbit’s
Moon—in French, La lune des lapins.
MacDonald: I’ve never understood the title.
Anger: It refers to a Japanese legend. The Japanese see in the full moon
the silhouette of a rabbit. See, the odd thing about the moon is that when
you’re in the latitude of the Orient, you’re seeing the moon at a diªerent
angle.We see a kind of face, two vague eyes and a smile—the “Man in the
Moon.” But the Japanese don’t see that; they see the body of a rabbit with
two ears sticking up. If you use your imagination, you can see the rabbit
by tipping your head to the side. The Japanese have developed a whole
mythology about this benign lunar spirit, and every full moon they leave
out rice cakes and sake for the Rabbit in the Moon. The next morning the
children note that the sake cup is empty and the rice cakes have disappeared,
and they think that the spirit came down and helped itself, and is happy
with them.
I combined that Japanese mythology of the Rabbit in the Moon with the
European commedia dell’arte tradition of mime theater,which involved basically
three characters. There’s Pierrot, the white clown—a lunar spirit who
dates back to the Middle Ages—who is unhappy, but it’s OK to make fun
of him. He’s quite a poetic figure, and he has two passions: he has a longing
for the moon—the phrase “reaching for the moon” refers to something
you want but can never have—and he’s infatuated with Columbine, who’s
a tease. His rival is Harlequin, who is a devil figure—the devil in his form
of the prankster. Just with variations on this simple combination of three
characters the Commedia dell’Arte made any number of little plays that were
popular across Europe. It started in Italy, then went to France, and was very
popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The best representation
of Pierrot in commercial film is in The Children of Paradise, where he’s
played by Jean-Louis Barrault.
MacDonald: I see Rabbit’s Moon as a film about you as a filmmaker.
You’re a combination of both Pierrot and Harlequin: you’re always reaching
for the moon, longing for the light; and at the same time you’re playing
tricks on the audience who are also longing for something they hope you
can give them.
Anger: The magic lantern I used in the film was a real one, from the eighteenth
century. It was part of the Cinémathèque’s collection of magic lanterns.
They loaned it to me. In the film I show that Columbine is a projection
of the magic lantern,which is controlled by Harlequin,who is a Lucifer
figure.
I had to work very fast on Rabbit’s Moon; I had to make the costumes,
build the set, and do the filming within four weeks. Pierre Braunberger had
lent me his little studio, the Cinema Panthéon, just a single soundstage near
the Panthéon on the Left Bank. The idea was that I’d be out of there, and
the place would be restored to the way it was, when he came back from vacation.
Everyone in France goes on vacation in August.
MacDonald: Rabbit’s Moon was shot in 35mm. Where did the money
come from?
Anger: It wasn’t a matter of the money. The 35mm raw stock came from
Russian friends of the Cinémathèque who had come to Paris to do a film
on UNESCO—the children’s division of the United Nations. They had a
couple of thousand feet of 35mm, something like six cans of unexposed raw
stock, left over. It was the same emulsion, they told me, that Eisenstein used
to make Ivan the Terrible [part 1, 1943; part 2, 1946]: a very fine-grain, beautiful
stock. It wasn’t fast; you needed quite a lot of light, compared to modern
emulsions. I figured those six cans were just enough, if I just shot one
take of everything, to make this little fantasy on the theme of the commedia
dell’arte and end up with a short film.
I was also lucky enough to have a professional cameraman working on
the film: Tourjansky, the son of the famous Russian émigré silent director
in Russia and France.
MacDonald: There have been multiple versions of Rabbit’s Moon. I don’t
know if I’ve seen the longer version.
Anger: The longer version is printed in blue and has cut-ins in rose or
pink: shots of woodcuts of the moon. That version is twenty minutes long.
MacDonald: It still exists?
Anger: Yes, it’ll be on my DVD, which is due to come out later this year.
Rabbit’s Moon uses a lot of repeats and deliberately unmatched shots. Pierrot
will make a gesture like reaching up to the moon, and then he’ll make the
same gesture in another shot, but it isn’t like the usual tight cutting on movement
you see in most commercial films. I knew all those conventional techniques.
I had been absorbing movie techniques since I was a little boy growing
up in Hollywood around people who were working in the industry—so
I knew when I could break the rules. I wasn’t just fooling around. From the
beginning I had a film language to work from.
At any rate, I had this unique opportunity to have a professional studio
with professional lights. My set was an artificial forest scene. I repainted some
cut-down tree branches in black and silver, and they were built in perspective,
so they got smaller as they went away from the camera—I didn’t have
much depth to work with in what was a fairly small room. Doing Rabbit’s
Moon, I was inspired by Méliès, and by his flat depth of field. And I was
fortunate to have actors from the Parisian mime school (later it became the
Marcel Marceau School), who were trained in pantomime and were happy
to work with me.
MacDonald: You mentioned that you only had stock for a limited number
of takes. But the film looks very carefully choreographed. Did you spend
a lot of time rehearsing?
Anger: They were professionals, thoroughly schooled in what they were
doing. I explained that I wanted an imaginary tightrope walk, imaginary
juggling; they had done things like that, so they knew what to do. And, of
course, they were familiar with the characters of Pierrot, Harlequin, and
Columbine. I was working with people who were in a sense already rehearsed.
They were a very nice small cast to work with.
MacDonald: It’s easy to think of Rabbit’s Moon as an expression of your
happiness at being in Europe.
Anger: It was. That can also be said of Eaux d’artifice.
MacDonald: In my book The Garden in the Machine, I conjectured about
the relationship between Eaux d’artifice and Fireworks. Fireworks is about
the repression of your gay desire in America and how that desire finds ways
to express itself, even to explode, when it’s repressed.When you got to Europe,
you were able to express this desire without the resistance you had experienced
here, and, as a result, Eaux d’artifice suggests an explosion of pleasure
and freedom, and of freedom of expression. Is that a fair reading?
Anger:Well, I wouldn’t characterize my American period as repression,
because it really wasn’t. I was able to make films, short as they were.
I’ve always had parallel projects going on at any one time, for a very simple
reason: I was never able to make anything approaching feature-length
because that always involved more money than I could round up. At the time
that I was doing the early films, there just wasn’t a network of foundations
backing films. I had to come up with my own ways of financing things.
I went to Italy and lived in Rome to make Eaux d’artifice, which was
filmed in Tivoli, a town about thirty miles from Rome, in the Alban Hills.
The gardens in the film are part of the estate of the d’Este family. In those
days, the eldest son of a wealthy family would go into the military, and the
next son would go into the church, whether he was suited for it or not. And
that’s what happened to the fellow who became the cardinal d’Este when he
was only sixteen. He supervised the design of that garden on that hill; it was
his place to have a good time. The garden is an amazing use of water as an
element of architecture; hydraulics, just natural gravity, makes all the fountains
work.
The most surprising thing was that I was given permission by the Department
of Antiquities in Italy to make my film. Those gardens are a tourist
attraction, and I couldn’t just go in there with a camera and start filming. I
had to block oª certain sections of the garden so that I wouldn’t have tour
Kenneth Anger 27
Water from fountains in the gardens of the Villa d’Este in Kenneth Anger’s
Eaux d’artifice (1953). Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
guides and groups of tourists coming into my picture. I don’t know if a
young American would be given that privilege today. They told me with good
humor, “Don’t break any old statuary,” which I didn’t; I was respectful of
everything. Sometimes an American Express guide behind my barrier would
be shouting, “Hurry up! We have to get in because we have to go on to see
Hadrian’s Villa!” But I was able to get the film shot.
MacDonald: How did Carmello Salvatorelli get into the project?
Anger: Ah, yes, she was a little midget I had met socially through Fellini
in Rome, and of course . . .
MacDonald: You said “she”; it’s a “he,” right?
Anger: No, it’s a lady.
MacDonald: It’s not a man in drag?
Anger: Absolutely no. No, no, no. Why would you think that?
MacDonald: It’s spelled “Carmello” in the program note P. Adams Sitney
reproduces in Visionary Film [New York: Oxford University Press, 1974,
2002], and in the filmography of Moonchild, edited by Jack Hunter [New
York: Creation Books, 2002]. I saw the spelling and assumed it was a man.
Anger:No, it’s Carmilla, as in J. Sheridan LeFanu’s short story “Carmilla.”
MacDonald: I need to rethink my interpretation of the film! [In The Garden
in the Machine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2002), I use my misreading of Salvatorelli’s gender in arguing that in
Europe Anger was able to release his feminine side.]
Anger: Carmilla was a wonderful little lady who was patiently willing to
work with me through a whole summer. The di‹cult thing about that project
was that not only was I working in a place where I couldn’t simply do whatever
I wanted, but also I had to work in certain areas of the garden at certain
times of day. I was filming on 16mm reversal Ferrania film using a deep
red filter for the night eªect, which means I was using natural light as if it
were artificial light. Because there were a lot of tall cypresses in the garden,
the light would sometimes be right in a certain area only for ten or fifteen
minutes. The light would come through, and then it’d be gone for the rest
of the day. So I needed to figure out in advance when the light that I needed,
the backlighting particularly, would be coming through the trees, and get
specific areas blocked oª at just the right moment. Once I figured out where
the light would be in a certain place, I had my actor get into position and
my two cameramen, Charles and Thad Lovett, go to work.
Charles and Thad were Americans living in Rome—as a matter of fact,
I was living with them in Rome. They had a camera that I wished I could
have owned: a 16mm Éclair with a mirrored viewfinder, so you could look
through the lens and see what you were shooting. Charles and Thad were
very enthusiastic about working with me, so as with La lune des lapins, I had
skilled cameramen helping me. I was very grateful for that.
Carmilla is a mysterious figure in an eighteenth-century costume, wearing
a mask, who you never see in close-up; she’s always seen at a distance.
I knew I wanted a small person, because when I was first studying the gardens,
I compared them to Piranesi’s etchings of the same gardens in the eighteenth
century. Piranesi also did etchings of the ruins of Rome and other
famous old buildings, and when he wanted to give the viewer a sense of scale,
he would use very small people, to make the ruins or the fountains or the
monuments seem bigger. I decided I would use that same technique. And it
worked.When you see the figure in Eaux d’artifice come down the winding,
curved balustrade, the balustrade is above her head—she has to reach up
to it—whereas a normal-sized human would reach down or over to hold
onto the balustrade.
MacDonald: Was Vivaldi part of the original conception?
Anger: Yes. I love The Four Seasons, and I figured that I would just use
one movement, the winter movement, Yes, I always had Vivaldi in mind.
MacDonald: Early on,when you were writing letters to Amos Vogel, looking
for financial help to get that film made [see Anger’s letters in Cinema 16:
Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2002)], you refer to the film as “Waterworks.”
Anger: That was my working title. But then I realized that “waterworks”
often means sewers, so I decided not to use it. “Eaux d’artifice” is a pun I
invented. The French have an expression, feux d’artifice, their name for “fireworks.”
So I use e-a-u-x, rather than f-e-u-x: waters of artifice. I wanted to
refer back to Fireworks and forward to this new project. The French aren’t
oªended by my pun; I’ve asked various people in France, and they’ve all
said it’s okay. I’ve never seen anyone else use my little pun. I also had an
Italian title for the film, “Aqua Barroque,” which I thought I would use if
there were a chance to open the film in Italy, but that didn’t happen.
After Eaux d’artifice I did conceive of a couple of other baroque garden
films. For example, I visited a garden called Bomarzo; it’s located between
Florence and Rome. It’s quite famous, though it’s oª the beaten tourist path.
It has huge boulders that were carved into monster faces by slaves in the sixteenth
century, and you can walk through the mouths into little rooms. It
was a folly commissioned by a nobleman. I never got around to filming that
garden; if I had, I would have used another movement from The Four Seasons.
At that time, Bomarzo was an overgrown, wild ruin; I loved it because
it was so romantic.
My idea at one point was to do four films about four gardens, one for
each of the four seasons, but I wasn’t able to find the financing, so I moved
on and eventually moved back to the States.
MacDonald: Your career has a lot of beginnings that don’t get financed
into complete films. I’m thinking particularly of Puce Moment [1949],
which was originally going to be Puce Women, and Kustom Kar Kommandos.
What was the original plan for Puce Women?
Anger: I did have a written script for it; it’s filed with Anthology Film
Archives, and I also made preproduction drawings for the whole film. Because
of my Hollywood background, I picked up on the idea of doing drawings
for every shot, and I’ve done that for several of my projects.
MacDonald: Do the drawings still exist?
Anger: They do for Puce Women. But to answer your question: Puce
Womenwas to be about forty minutes long. It was to begin early in the morning
and go through the day, ending in twilight. Each section would be appropriate
to a particular time of day—morning, noon, afternoon, and twilight—
and would be represented by a diªerent woman. Each of the women would
be based on a Hollywood star of the twenties: the morning woman would
evoke Clara Bow, and the noon woman would be like Barbara La Marr, and
so forth. They would be dressed in authentic costumes that my grandmother
had given me; she had kept costumes, and they were still in excellent condition.
I found locations—the houses in Hollywood—I would use, and I’d
chosen and blocked in the women I was going to work with, but I was never
able to find the money. The only thing I ended up with was basically a test
for one woman, who was played by Yvonne Marquis; she had a vivacious
quality like Clara Bow.
Puce Moment was one of those projects that I wanted to make so badly
that I even tried getting sponsorship from some Hollywood people. I went
to see Albert Lewin, who had made The Picture of Dorian Gray [1945]. I
knew that he had a collection of voodoo art and primitive paintings. I
thought he might be interested. I showed Puce Moment to him, hoping he
might be convinced to provide some sponsorship, and I also showed it to
Arthur Freed, while he was a producer of musicals—this was before he did
Singin’ in the Rain [1952]. They politely looked at Puce Moment, but then,
you know, I never got a check [laughter]. Later, it seemed to me that I saw
some glimpses of the fashion parade I had used in Puce Moment in Singin’
in the Rain—maybe not; maybe it’s just coincidence, but it seemed like some
moments in Singin’ in the Rain paralleled my idea pretty closely.
Some grants were becoming available at that time. I applied to the
Guggenheim Foundation and was turned down, which was rather annoying
because to apply you had to get twelve people to say that you weren’t a
criminal. I found that very oªensive.
MacDonald: I always think of the Guggenheim, especially in those days,
as interested in abstract art.
Anger: Probably. I don’t know. Later, people told me that you’ve got to
be willing to be turned down about twelve times before they’ll give you a
grant. That seemed like too much of a waste of time, so I just moved on.
MacDonald: The music on some of your films changes over time, and
I’m wondering whether that’s because you have a love-hate relationship with
pop music; pop music can come to seem out-of-date more quickly than some
other forms of music. Is that why the sound tracks change?
Anger: Absolutely not. I consider myself an experimental artist, and even
once a film is “done,” if I want to try something else, and make a new version
of a film, I will. This may annoy critics who are trying to keep track of
everything, but this tendency of mine dates back to my earliest films, which
were like three-minute or five-minute shorts that had to be run at silent speed
because the only camera I had at that time ran at sixteen frames a second.
I would just play a record along with a film and see if I liked it, and then
I’d try another record.When I’d look at Who Has Been Rocking My Dream
Boat?, I played the Mills Brothers song “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat”
on my phonograph.
My first sound track for Puce Moment was Puccini, the interlude for his
first opera, Le Villi [“The Willies”]. It has the same plot as Les Silphides, the
ballet about the phantoms. I liked that piece very much and used it for a while,
and then I thought I’d try something else. In the sixties I met the musician
who composed what became the second sound track for Puce Moment.
MacDonald: What was The Love That Whirls [1949]?
Yvonne Marquis in Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949). Courtesy David E. James.
Anger: That was my first film in color, in Kodachrome. I had met a remarkable-
looking young man, named Ernest Lacy; he had an Irish mother
and a Mexican father, so he was an interesting mixture. He had extraordinary
eyes. I wanted to make a film with him. The idea for it came from
Fraser’s The Golden Bough. The film was to present a ritual of sacrifice.Many
diªerent cultures have had ritual sacrifices, but I was thinking specifically
of Aztec rituals. The film involved Lacy climbing to the top of a mountain
and sacrificing himself to the sun. During the film he was nude. He had a
beautiful body, and I was just using him as a nude figure, which has a long
tradition in art, and has nothing to do with pornography.
I filmed The Love That Whirls on Kodachrome, and at that time, to get
16mm Kodachrome developed, you had to send it to Rochester, New York.
When I sent the film to Kodak, they confiscated it because of the nudity,
and I never got it back. They had a flat rule about nudity; it didn’t matter
whether it was a woman or a man or a child. No nudity. Parents couldn’t
even make home movies of their children in the bathtub or playing in a
sprinkler. Looking back, I probably could have gotten a lawyer and at least
tried to convince them to send it back. But I didn’t do that. So I was shot
down by Eastman Kodak. Their monopoly broke up in the sixties, and then
there were independent labs that could develop Kodachrome and were willing
to print nude imagery.
MacDonald: I think for me Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is your
most remarkable film. P. Adams Sitney talks about an early three-screen version
of that film. Does that version still exist?
Anger: That version was shown at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 and
at a couple of film festivals. That world’s fair in Brussels is where I met Marie
Menken; she was there, too, as was Brakhage; they both saw the three-screen
Inauguration. At that point, the first part of the film used a single screen,
but for the last twenty minutes—the party sequence, which begins when the
characters start putting on masks—the film split into three images The two
side images were mirror images of each other. I varied that a bit, but quite
a lot of it had a kind of mirror eªect, so that one person might be looking
toward the center image from one side and another person from the opposite
side.
I knew about Abel Gance and his Napoléon [1927], which used a triptych
format. I met Abel Gance, and Nellie Kaplan, who was his assistant; they
showed some of their films at the Brussels World’s Fair too. Gance was fascinated
with my film and not at all upset; he was pleased that I had picked
up on his three-screen idea and used it.
Of course, the trick with a three-projector piece is that all three projectors
have to be in sync, and at that time I had help from the Siemans
Company in Germany; they were one of the sponsors of the showings and
provided the projectors for the Brussels Exposition. They agreed to supply
a coaxial cable linking up the three projectors, which I guess for them was
very easy, but would have been impossible for me. I had worked out the threescreen
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome only in theory.
And so that version was shown in Brussels and also at the Palais de Challiot
in Paris. But a time came when I decided I just couldn’t do this version
anymore; the logistics were much too complicated. I decided that the threescreen
version had been an experiment, that I had completed the experiment;
and I made a final, single-screen version. In my final recut of Inauguration
I use a lot of superimpositions, and to make those, I cannibalized the two
twenty-minute reels on the two sides and incorporated them. That’s the version
that’s in distribution now.
MacDonald: When I read about the three-screen version and that it began
with one screen and then expanded to three screens, it seemed to work
perfectly with the character development in the film.You start with this one
character, Lord Shiva, who seems, first, to split into, or to see within himself,
two characters—Kali and the Great Beast—and then to keep opening
out into more and more figures. I don’t think of Inauguration as a narrative
but as a ritual that allows the complex multiplicity of the central figure’s
psyche—and, in a sense, everyone’s psyche—to be revealed.
Anger: And that’s all quite deliberate.
The film is based on a musical form—theme and variation.
MacDonald: Did the three-screen version have the Janácek sound track?
When I was first seeing Inauguration, it had an Electric Light Orchestra
sound track . . .
Anger: For a short while, yes—another experiment.
MacDonald: The diªerent sound tracks tend to create diªerent experiences
of the film, with diªerent emphases. Juxtaposed with the ELO sound track,
the elegance and extravagance of your imagery moved to the foreground; but
with the Janácek, the humor of the visuals becomes the foreground—at least
for me.
Anger: All along, I was experimenting with various tracks, some of which
I never recorded. I had always known about Leo Janácek’s Slavonic Mass,
and I had that in mind even when I was filming the imagery. I found a recording
of The Slavonic Mass by Raphael Kubelik that I liked, and I used that.
MacDonald: In my book on Cinema 16 I reprinted a number of letters
between you and Vogel, written at a time when it looked like the film was
going to have a Harry Partch sound track. Does a print with that sound
track still exist?
Anger:Well, Harry is not alive anymore, so you can’t talk to him, but I’ll
give you my version. In the early fifties I heard an LP of some of his music
performed using his own instruments. He had invented things called “cloud
chambers,”big glass bells that he had cut the bottoms oª and used like gongs,
and several stringed instruments. He was quite a unique artist. Looking
back, I wish I’d done a documentary on him and his instruments. I liked the
music on this LP and told him so, and I asked if it would be okay if I used
it on an experimental film I was completing. He said yes. So I went ahead
and used his music with my imagery—but his piece was five minutes too
long for the picture. I saw a little section that I thought could be trimmed
out of the music, so that it would fit exactly with my imagery, and I went
ahead and trimmed that section.
When I showed the test print to Harry, he was furious. He said, “You
can’t cut my music! If you want to use the whole thing, that’s okay, but you
can’t cut my music!” And he asked me to destroy the print, which I did.
Looking at that version of my imagery with Partch’s music made for a
very diªerent experience. In that early version there were no optical eªects
at all, no dissolves or superimpositions, so every cut was like an abrupt slap;
the film had more of a cubist eªect, very diªerent from later versions. I’m
sorry that what I did oªended Harry; I suppose I should have asked him
first, but it was a slow little section of the music, and there was no way I
could have put additional visuals in to make the imagery fit the sound. After
that, I realized that I should commission my own music, so I wouldn’t
have problems with permissions.
MacDonald: You’ve obviously spent a lot of time studying world mythologies.
When you were making Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, how fully
did you assume the audience would make particular identifications? I ask
the question on two diªerent levels. Anaïs Nin plays Astarte. I’ve always assumed
that you assumed a substantial portion of the audience would recognize
not just the mythological role Nin plays but that it’s her playing this role.
Nin herself was/is something of a mythical figure. To what extent did you
think about the audience’s awareness, or lack of awareness, about the history
of mythologies when you were making the film?
Anger: I’ve always made my films for myself, and how much of what I
put into them is picked up by other people is not my concern. Otherwise I’d
have program notes. I do sometimes have program notes that identify the
cast and the names of the figures they play. But that’s about as far as I’ll go.
My films are enigmas to be figured out. My films are based on my lifelong
research, and they add something to that research. If you can pick up on
the results, fine; it’s all there if you want to explore it—but you may have to
do some research of your own.
MacDonald: Samson de Brier played a number of roles in Inauguration
of the Pleasure Dome. Was there a particular reason for that?
Anger: The whole film evolved from a Halloween party at which various
friends came dressed as gods and goddesses. Samson had a number of diªer-
ent costumes; he would appear in one costume, then disappear and reappear
in another. So I based the film on his personality; he’s the main character,
sort of the master of ceremonies of this event (which, by the way, was
filmed in his house).
MacDonald: In his filmography Haller lists The Story of O [1961].What
can you tell me about that project?
Anger:When I was living in France,my publisher was Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
He brought out the original edition of Hollywood Babylon, which I
wrote in French, before it came out in English. At that time Jean-Jacques
was the publisher of a rather notorious novel, Histoire d’O, by Pauline Reage.
It was an erotic novel; I guess you could call it a sadomasochistic fairytale
because it’s absolutely a fantasy, nothing that could actually happen in real
life. I met the author, whose real name is Dominique Aury, and she gave me
permission to film the book, and I began work on a black-and-white, silent
film. My model for the project was Bresson. I shot about twenty minutes,
and then the production came to a halt: it turned out that the father of the
young lady who was playing the lead was the French minister of finance.
The girl was in her late teens, old enough to make up her own mind about
Anaïs Nin as Astarte in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).
Courtesy David E. James.
what she wanted to do, but at any rate, the filming had to stop when it became
known that she was playing a part in an erotic film. It wasn’t pornographic,
but did involve some nudity and some simulated S&M; most everything
takes place oª camera. The film was basically an exercise in style. I
had a work print of what I had shot, which I left at the Cinémathèque
Française. Another unfinished project.
MacDonald:When I think about Scorpio Rising, it reminds me a little of
All That Jazz [1979, directed by Bob Fosse], in the sense that the beginning
sequences are the most powerful, and the film seems gradually to fall away
from the energy we sense early on. For me, and I’m guessing to some extent
for you, the process of getting ready for the big social moment is the most
exciting part; and the moment itself can never quite live up . . .
Anger: . . . to the anticipation—yes. Paradoxically, I’ve always felt that
getting dressed up, putting on a costume, is more exciting, more fascinating
to watch, than striptease.What people choose to put on—their clothes, their
adornments—is more interesting than the undressing part.
MacDonald: A related thought: as a filmmaker you’ve had many experiences
where you have conceptions, and sometimes far more than conceptions,
about what you want to do in a film; and then in the process of trying
to get the film produced, you come into contact with a world that really
doesn’t care about your plans. Once in a while you are able to get a film
done—and usually it’s a remarkable film—but there are so many cases where
the actual contact with the realities of money keeps the film from getting
made; your professional experience as a filmmaker is often more about the
excitement of anticipation than about what results.
Anger: Yes, and some of this has to do with the way I am. I think it took
Oliver Stone twenty years to find a producer for his first script, Platoon
[1986]. But once he’d broken that barrier, he was able to make commercial
films; he became “bankable,” and large amounts of money were available
to him. I can’t stick with one project for twenty years. I’ve had some very
good projects, but when the money didn’t turn up—if I didn’t know how
to get it, or if I was turned down—I would just move on. I learned not to
get tragic about these things, and I’d just move on to something else. I’d think
to myself, “Well, okay, that’s going to remain a dream project.”
MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising, you examine, among other things, a very
common kind of doublethink, where men get together to enjoy each other
sensually, but pretend that the homoerotic element of the experience is not
there. Could you talk about the young men you worked with in Scorpio
Rising?
Anger: All my actors in Scorpio Risingwere straight. They were workingclass
guys, Italian Americans mostly,who would have been upset by the way
I portray them. Scorpio Rising was me putting that inference on their soci-
Kenneth Anger 37
ety, seeing their society as an outsider, which can be a limitation but also an
advantage. In fact, the men had girlfriends, but at the Halloween party they
said, “We don’t want our girlfriends in the picture; we want to be in the picture!”
They were showing oª a little bit, or maybe a lot, for the camera. This
was a case where the camera changed things, but it changed them in a direction
that I wanted. So Scorpio Rising is my take on their lifestyle, not
their lifestyle untouched.
In fact, some of the men that you see getting dressed for the party in the
film weren’t even at the party. The blonde who puts on a leather jacket when
you hear the song “Blue Velvet”wasn’t even in New York.When I got back
to Los Angeles after filming most of what became Scorpio in Brooklyn and
was cutting the film, I met this young man, who was a model with the Athletic
Model Guild, which was run by a friend of mine named Bob Mizer.
Before explicit or hard-core magazines were available, there were these physique
magazines, and Mizer had one called Physique Pictorial that published
some of the early drawings of Tom of Finland, and camp photographs
Mizer did of drifters that he’d find around LA, posed either in a leather
jacket or blue jeans or a posing strap. I used to go over there to the AMG
near MacArthur Park quite often. On one of my visits I met this fellow, and
I put him in the film.
Another thing: while I was cutting the film, living in Silverlake, a package
was left on my doorstep. Since it was a 16mm film package, I assumed
it was for me, and I opened it: it was a Sunday school film rented from the
Lutheran Church. I looked at the package more carefully and realized that
it was addressed to the same street address, but to a diªerent street. I decided
to run the film, and when I saw it, I thought, “Well, I’m just going to
keep this and cut it into my film.” And that’s how I got Last Journey to
Jerusalem [1948]. I thought of it as the gods acting up, doing a little prank,
doing me a favor. The film was perfect for my purposes.
I immediately saw the parallel between the disciples following Jesus and
the “disciples” in the motorcycle gang following some idea. And I saw that
in both cases, this kind of following could lead into dangerous territory,
as it did for the Hell’s Angels, who started out just as guys who had been
vets in World War II, a little wild, but not dangerous; but later morphed
into something else, drifted into drug dealing, and gained quite a negative
reputation.
MacDonald: Over the years there’s been some debate about the ending
of Scorpio Rising, whether it’s the Scorpio character we’re seeing dead in
the flashing light.
Anger: No, it’s not Scorpio. After the Halloween party, the motorcycle
gang went to a place called Walden Pond, in upstate New York. They rode
up there on their bikes after staying up all night and on November 1 were
38 A Critical Cinema 5
part of the last outdoor dirt bike race of the year. Some of them actually
rode in the race; the others just went up there to hang out. I rode on the
back of one of the riders’ bikes with my camera. During the race, there was
that accident; one of the bikes flipped over and crashed right in front of my
camera. I incorporated that, as the final image. But it’s not Scorpio. The
man you see in the flashing red light—Jim Powers—was a biker who was
killed later, but not in front of my camera, though that is the implication
I’m making. As a hobby, motorcycle racing is quite dangerous, and I think
that’s the appeal: the bikers all think they’re immortal.
Scorpio is the sign of the Zodiac that rules machines and death and sex.
That’s the tie-in.
MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising the men you’re depicting, at least early on
in the film, are quite beautiful about getting themselves ready, getting their
machines ready; and then as the film moves on, as they gather into a group,
at first it’s a party but then it turns more toward something creepy. I’m wondering
whether one of the things you’re suggesting is that very often when
you do follow your dreams and find other people who are sharing this dream,
there can be great pleasure, but also great danger. I’m trying to understand
the Nazi imagery in the film—in your mind is it the number of people that
makes dreams turn dangerous, or . . .
Anger:Well, Scorpio Rising isn’t a cautionary tale. I’m not trying to say,
“Don’t do this because you’ll end up a Nazi,” but I did find an element of
swagger and bullying in this culture. Actually the particular guys I knew
weren’t threatening, at least to me, and I became quite good friends with
some of them—they accepted me as some sort of camera nut, and they saw
me accepting them as bike nuts—but there often is a rebellious dimension
in biker groups that makes some bikers defiantly enjoy doing things that
might scare other people—like sporting swastikas.
I first asked this bunch if I could photograph their bikes when I met them
under the Cyclone [a roller coaster] at Coney Island, where they used to
meet on Saturdays. Mostly they were from Brooklyn. I was living in Brooklyn
myself at the time, with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in Brooklyn
Heights.
MacDonald: What was that like?
Anger: You may be aware that Marie Menken and Willard Maas, who
she was living with, were the couple that inspired Edward Albee to write
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and if you know the play, you can imagine
that the experience was unusual.Willard and Marie had a strange symbiotic
relationship.Willard was gay, and Marie was not; and there was a son
who would show up occasionally. I was with them for about three months
in their penthouse in Brooklyn Heights. Marie invited me to live there; I was
more Marie’s friend than Willard’s.Willard was teaching at a college out on
Kenneth Anger 39
Staten Island; he was a professor of literature. Marie worked at Time magazine
in the cable room.
They would begin drinking on Friday and would continue to drink all
weekend, and then on Monday morning, they’d both go back to work and
be on time for their jobs. Each weekend was like a lost weekend—well, a
found weekend for them, because this was how they could be themselves.
Sometimes I was a kind of referee, usually defending Marie—though I never
actually had to intervene.Watching their arguments was a little like watching
Punch and Judy. If I had been able to film their fights, I would have had
quite a film because they did the most extraordinary things. Sometimes when
they were both quite drunk, they would get up on this parapet overlooking
the skyline of lower Manhattan and the river. It was a fifteen-story drop
down to the sidewalk, and they’d be up on the parapet pushing each other;
they both knew how to step back and not fall oª, but a slight miscalculation
and one or both would have gone over that ledge. It was scary, but also
entertaining. On those alcoholic weekends I would have a couple of drinks,
but I certainly wasn’t drinking along with them.
Edward Albee was familiar with them from an earlier period. I remember
going to the premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? with Willard
and Marie. They were laughing at it and everything, but they never said,
“Oh, that’s us!”Afterward,Willard was quite critical. He said, “It’s too long;
Edward should cut out half an hour.” He was acting like a professor. They
must have recognized themselves, but they stayed friends with Edward. The
play was a hit, but so far as I know there was never anything like “Give us
a cut because you based it on our lives!” They only saw it once.
I was very close with Marie.We traveled in Europe together after the Brussels
World’s Fair. We went to Paris and then to Spain, and that’s where she
made her little short called Arabesque for Kenneth Anger [1961], in the Alhambra
in Granada. I helped her with that film; she was working with this little
16mm camera that used expensive little fifty-foot-load magazines. If she
had used a hundred-foot-load, she could have filmed for half price. But she
didn’t want the bigger, heavier camera. She liked this little thing that she
could hold in one hand; so while she was dancing around the columns and
the fountains, I would occasionally be behind the camera, guiding her, so
that she wouldn’t bump into something.
I miss Marie a lot.
MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising did you get the rights to use all the music?
Anger: I used about twelve selections, including Elvis Presley’s “Devil in
Disguise.” Since I intended to submit Scorpio Rising to film festivals and to
show it around, I decided I needed to get the rights. I hired a rights clearance
lawyer in New York and turned the whole thing over to him, and he
got the clearances, not for a feature film, but for a short. If it had been a
40 A Critical Cinema 5
feature film it probably would have been more expensive, but the clearance
for all the music came to eight thousand dollars. That about doubled my
budget.
It was pop music that was playing the summer of 1963, when I was filming;
it was just prior to the Kennedy assassination, and just before the Beatles,
who came in and messed up American music as far as I’m concerned.
They became such a fad and were in the top five for so long that a lot of
good American musicians and songwriters got pushed out.
MacDonald:Was the idea of using the individual songs as modules part
of the original conception of the film?
Anger: The music was an integral part of what I wanted. I am a pioneer
in using music this way, along with Bruce Conner,who began using pop music
in a similar way around the same time.
MacDonald: The only film I know of that may be earlier in its use of previously
recorded pop music, though it doesn’t use rock and doesn’t use the
music ironically the way you and Bruce do, is Weegee’s New York [ca. 1952].
Anger: What is Weegee’s New York?
MacDonald: It’s a short city symphony of New York, and especially of
Coney Island beach on a crowded summer day, shot by the photographer
Weegee.
Anger: Of course, I’m very familiar with Weegee’s still photographs, but
I’ve not seen that film.
MacDonald:When Amos Vogel found out that Weegee, who was a member
of Cinema 16, made films, he said, “We’ve got to show this material.”
According to Vogel,Weegee had no idea how to edit a film and no interest
in learning, so Vogel did the editing. The finished film uses pop music of the
early fifties, before rock and roll, almost the entire songs, so the structure
of the Coney Island section of Weegee’s New York is somewhat similar to
Scorpio Rising. Nobody seems to remember who put the sound on the film.
Anger: Weegee had such an eye for the grotesque, like Diane Arbus. I
loved his still photography. He was the first one to photograph car accidents
and things like that and show that they could be a brutal kind of art.
In Scorpio Rising, the songs are an ironic commentary on what’s going
on in the picture. They’re a kind of narration.When I have the fellow from
the Athletic Model Guild put on his leather jacket, the music is “Blue Velvet,”
which specifically says, “She wore blue velvet.” It’s a deliberate gender
switch that suggests that he’s as vain as any girl would be. Of course, men
have a right to be vain about their appearance, to take pains to decorate
themselves; that’s a human trait, from primitive man or woman on.
MacDonald: In the little monograph by Robert Haller that accompanies
The Magic Lantern Cycle videos, Scorpio Rising is dedicated to “Jack
Parsons, Victor Childe, Jim Powers, James Dean, T. E. Lawrence, Hart
Crane,Kurt Mann, The Society of Spartans, The Hell’s Angels, and all the
overgrown boys who will follow the whistle of Love’s brother.” Some of
these names are familiar to me; others are not.Who, for example, was Jack
Parsons?
Anger: He was a famous rocket scientist who invented the fuel that took
the Apollo to the moon. He was married to Cameron, who plays the Scarlet
Woman in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Jack was killed in 1952 in
an explosion at his home in Pasadena.Apparently he had explosives at home.
He and Cameron were supposed to leave for Mexico that morning, and
Cameron had gone to a shop close by to get some supplies, and when she
got back, the workshop had blown up and her husband was dead.
MacDonald: Who was/is Victor Childe?
Anger: Victor Childe was a friend of mine, a skilled painter in the surrealist
tradition. He was working on a large, elaborate painting called The
Bone Garden for about ten years. He was also a script writer and at one point
wrote a script about a mermaid. At that time there were no films about mermaids,
and Constance Bennett took an option on Victor’s script, and it looked
like the film was set for production. Then in England somebody else made a
movie about a mermaid, and when Constance heard about this other movie,
she said, “Well, I can’t do it now because the novelty has been ruined,” and
decided not to take up the option. Victor was counting on this sale to solve
all his financial problems—he had gotten himself in a big hole financially—
and he committed suicide by turning on the gas in his apartment, which was
above a restaurant in Hollywood. One of the waitresses smelled gas from
down below and came up to see what was wrong and knocked on his door;
Victor was still conscious and switched oª the light, which created a spark
that was enough to set oª an explosion, and he was killed. The Bone Garden
was completely burned, covered with blisters—it was a photo-realist painting,
an amazing structure of skeletons and bones, totally original. I just
wanted to remember him a little bit; that’s why I mentioned his name in that
dedication.
MacDonald: Jim Powers?
Anger: He was the one who was “killed” at the end of Scorpio Rising.
It’s his head you see in the red flashing police light, and I have a shot of his
arm with his tattoo, “Blessed, blessed oblivion.” It wasn’t long after the filming
that he drove his car as fast as he could into a wall in San Francisco and
killed himself.
MacDonald: And Kurt Mann?
Anger: Kurt Mann was the son of Thomas Mann. He committed suicide
by jumping oª a boat to Cuba.
As I wrote in the preface to my friend’s book on celebrity suicide
[David K. Frasier, Suicide in the Entertainment Industry: An Encyclopedia
42 A Critical Cinema 5
of 840 Twentieth Century Cases (Jeªerson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002)], there
have been quite a few suicides among people I’ve known. It is odd that I’ve
known so many.
I’ve recently finished a film tribute—Elliott’s Suicide—to another friend
of mine who committed suicide not long ago. He was a songwriter and singer
named Elliott Smith. He’s on the Dreamworks label. He killed himself last
October. He was thirty-four and had had a fight with his girlfriend and
stabbed himself in the chest with a steak knife in his girlfriend’s kitchen,
which was so stupid—but people do stupid things. On the other hand, his
lyrics are quite dark; the word “suicide” occurs frequently. He had his own
destiny to work out, but I was really upset over his death and the waste of
this life, and I did Elliott’s Suicide as a little tribute to him. I photographed
the steak knife and it’s in the film. And I use several of his songs, including,
“Follow Me to the Rose Parade”; apparently he liked to get stoned on the
last night of the year and in the morning go with friends to the Rose Parade
in Pasadena. This past January, after he died, I shot part of the Rose Parade,
and I’ve incorporated some of the passing floats in my film. The Rose
Parade floats move so slowly that even though they’re filmed in actual time,
they suggest slow motion, and I use that in an elegiac sense in the film.
MacDonald: Is the film available?
From Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963). Courtesy David E. James.
Anger: I haven’t printed it up yet; but it’s basically assembled. It’s eighteen
minutes long.
MacDonald: Did you know Spalding Gray’s work?
Anger: Yes. He jumped oª a ferry—like Kurt Mann. But I understand he
had been in a bad car accident in Ireland and was apparently in a lot of pain—
he just couldn’t deal with it anymore. He was so talented. I’d seen people do
monologues before, but he certainly perfected the form. How he could just
be there sitting at his table with a glass of water, and maybe a couple of notes,
and yet be absolutely riveting—it was remarkable.
MacDonald: I saw him a number of times at the Performing Garage in
New York and loved Demme’s film of Swimming to Cambodia [1987]. Losing
him was a blow.
Like Puce Moment, Kustom Kar Kommandos is a kind of monument to
a project that never got financed.
Anger: Yes. Luckily I have at least as much from those projects as I do—
two short films. Kustom Kar Kommandos is about three minutes long; it was
supposed to be forty-five minutes.
I found a whole series of young men who were willing to work with me,
by going to the shows where they brought their custom cars. I met them
there, and they were very proud of what they call their “babies.”What they
did was a kind of folk art; they were skilled artisans turning a standard Ford
and Chevy into something quite unique. It was to be a study of the whole
culture of the remarkable custom car world; it still exists. At that time it was
quite new; I discovered it about the same time Tom Wolfe did. The film
was to end with a car meet or a race. The project paralleled Scorpio Rising
to some extent, but wasn’t going to end in a death.
MacDonald: The first letters of the title words make up KKK; were you
going to do something with the Ku Klux Klan in that film?
Anger: The title has nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan. In the custom
car culture, they use Ks instead of Cs.
I had gotten some assistance from the Ford Foundation; they gave a modest
amount of money to a dozen filmmakers—only twelve thousand dollars,
not enough to make a longer film. I filmed what is now Kustom Kar Kommandos
with that Ford Foundation money. I filmed in the garage of the
young man who’s in the film—it was his car, and he did all the work on it—
in San Bernadino. The garage was cluttered and full of stuª, and I knew I
had to simplify the set, so I brought in a twelve-foot-wide roll of no-seam
paper, the sort of thing that’s used for fashion model shooting, where you
want just a plain background behind the model, and I used that to isolate
the car as an art object.
MacDonald: Lucifer Rising went through a number of stages, partly because
much of the original material was stolen, though some of it ended up
in Invocation of My Demon Brother.
Anger:Yes, that was when I had a falling-out with Bobby Beausoleil,who
I originally cast as Lucifer. I don’t really want to go into that whole story
again, but when I wasn’t home, he came in and took several cans of the
unedited footage I had shot of him. All I had left of that material was what
I had in my cutting bin, just loose rolled-up bits, but I was determined to
do something with that material, after all the eªort that had gone into filming
it. And so those scraps were used in Invocation of My Demon Brother
and added to that film’s rough, disjunctive texture.
MacDonald: Is everything that’s not your performance of the ritual in
Invocation from the earlier film?
Anger: Most of it, yes. For Invocation I performed a Crowley ceremony,
“The Equinox of the Gods,” to commemorate the autumn equinox, at the
Straight Theater in the Haight-Ashbury, in 1967. I had someone film it for
me, since I was involved in the ritual. I can’t remember who it was.
MacDonald: It was Ben Van Meter, I believe.
Anger: It was the only time I worked with him. In the end, Invocation of
My Demon Brotherwas something like a first rough sketch for Lucifer. Then
when I moved to London, I showed that eleven-minute piece to Mick Jagger,
and he volunteered to do an improvisation on his Moog synthesizer for
the track, which is rhythmic but very disjunctive and dissonant—which is
what I wanted. And I recast and re-formed the Lucifer project.
MacDonald:When you made Invocation of My Demon Brother, was part
of the motivation a desire to express your anger at Beausoleil? Were you
sending in your “spiritual marines” out of frustration with what had happened
to the Lucifer Rising project?
Anger: I did have a lot of frustration and rage from working with Bobby.
I cut images of soldiers jumping out of a helicopter,which were from a newsreel
of Vietnam, into the salvaged footage and my performance of the ritual.
I’ve always considered Invocationmy War Film; it reflects the feelings of
the war—not the actual events but the kind of things that it had unleashed.
MacDonald: Who was the albino boy?
Anger: I met him in the Haight-Ashbury; I met several of the characters
who would have been in the first version of Lucifer Rising in the Haight-
Ashbury, including Bobby: he was the guitarist of an acid rock group called
Love, and then he founded his own group called the Magic Powerhouse of
Oz; the name is typical of that period—purple prose.
MacDonald:Was there more to choosing to use this albino boy than just
his amazing looks?
Anger:Well, it was his looks and the fact that he was a light-sensitive person.
Albinos have very sensitive eyes. Usually when they’re outdoors they
wear dark glasses. If you put a bright light on them, it doesn’t actually harm
them, but their eyes will go into a reflexive spasm, a jerking motion, and I
was fascinated by this. I asked him if I could photograph him and if he’d
Kenneth Anger 45
do some gestures with the glass wand, and he said, “Sure.” Usually when I
meet people, I don’t take up much of their time. I don’t disrupt their lives.
To me this young man was sort of a supernatural entity, and that’s why I
used him.
MacDonald: I need some help with Lucifer Rising. There are dimensions
of the film that seem clear to me. The volcano spewing up lava from underground
at the beginning of the film is a basic metaphor for thinking
about your work: underneath the conventional social surface of things,
there are all these other worlds, and art is a means of bringing these worlds
to the surface, at least for a limited time. But a number of the mythological
figures in the film and even some of the places in the film are mysterious
to me. For example, while the Egyptian spaces are very recognizable,
there’s also the sequence with the two giant natural stone pillars with the
bridge across . . .
Anger: Those sandstone pillars are a freak of nature standing in the forest
near Externsteine, Germany. It’s a beautiful place. The nearest big city
is Hannover, an hour or so train ride away. The pillars are considered to be
as old as Stonehenge, and of that same Celtic culture. And like Stonehenge
they were basically used as a solar temple. The steps leading up to the small
temple on top of the one pillar were carved, and the temple itself was carved
out of the rock on top. The bridge between the pillars was restored by the
Nazis. During their very peculiar pagan revival the Nazis used the site as
part of their ceremonies for the Hitler Jugend. That’s where the Hitler Youth
were presented with their daggers when they were twelve years old.
But it was a solar temple, which is why I used it. In the temple room on
the top of the one stone pillar there’s a round window that’s cut into the
wall; and on the summer solstice, the longest day and shortest night of the
year—and only on that day—the sun comes through that window and illuminates
the altar. All we know about that Celtic culture, since they didn’t
leave any writings, is that they knew about astronomy and they worshiped
the sun and natural cycles.
MacDonald: And so, the Celtic gods are communicating with the Egyptian
gods.
Anger: Yes, all of them are tied together. I took the main figures in my
cast to Luxor, where the opening scene and some other scenes were filmed.
Miriam Gibril played Isis, the Egyptian goddess of nature who rises from
a fallen granite monolith at the beginning of the film. Donald Cammell—
the director of Performance [1970] and a friend of mine—played Osiris, the
lord of death. In Egyptian mythology Isis and Osiris are a couple, which
creates a symmetry: life and death.
Lucifer Rising was sort of a psychodrama because most of the people I
cast had something in their personal makeup that was reflected in the roles
they were playing. Donald Cammell was always half in love with death, and
he eventually shot himself. You can see this tendency in Performance (the
bullet going into the brain is the last image of Performance), and you can
see it in his other films, too. I chose Marianne Faithfull to be Lilith. In my
mind, Lilith is a complement to Lucifer: she’s a female demon, the spirit of
discontent—and Lucifer is the original rebel. But I’m the one who put them
together; you can’t find this combination in any mythology. I dressed Lilith
all in gray, and Marianne used gray makeup, all of which fits with traditional
interpretations of Lilith.
MacDonald: How close was the shape of the final Lucifer Rising to the
conception that you were working with originally?
Anger: The final version covers the main bases that I’d established. It was
always conceived as dreamlike, episodic, and without a narrative line that
you could follow in a conventional way.
Originally I did think I would include fragments of dialogue, and as a
matter of fact, several people do speak in the film; you see them talking.
The dialogue was short and simple. There’s a scene where Marianne Faithfull
as Lilith repeats, over and over, the word “memory,” and anyone who
can read lips can see that that’s what she’s saying. And I had Sir Francis
Rose, who played Chaos, saying, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
Again, you can read his lips. But when I was finally putting the film together,
since Bobby Beausoleil had volunteered to do the music, I decided to use
just music and drop the dialogue—but to leave the visuals of the dialogue
as a kind of sketchy and mysterious dimension of the film.
Sir Francis is no longer with us. He was a famous character: “mad, bad,
and dangerous to know.” A friend of Gertrude Stein’s. She wrote “A rose is
a rose is a rose” for him. He did the illustrations for her books of poems.
He was a sketch artist and an oil painter, but also completely mad; and as
he got older, he became crazier and crazier. I’m afraid that appearing in my
film got him oª on a tangent, and he decided he was the devil—soon after
the filming he did a shocking crime in Wales: he threw bricks through the
stained-glass windows of a church. He was arrested, but because he was a
sir, he was let oª. I hate to think that I had any indirect responsibility for
triggering his madness.
The Lucifer jacket with the letters on the back was made for me by Jann
Haworth, the wife of Peter Blake, who was an artist working in cloth. She
was with the Fraser Gallery in London. She had made several large dolls of
mythological figures, one of which was Lucifer. I saw the Lucifer doll on
exhibit, which is the reason I approached her.
MacDonald: It’s a great eªect near the end with the cone of light revealing
the magic circle. As a film person, it’s hard for me not to see it as an evocation
of the projector beam.
Anger: It’s actually a triangle. Lucifer is constructed using simple geometric
shapes: the circle and the triangle. The triangle is reflected in the Pyramids
and in that beam; and there are many circles in the film.
MacDonald: Did you make contact with Bobby Beausoleil, once he was
in prison? How did you bring him back into the project?
Anger: Once he was in prison, we exchanged letters. His being in prison
was his karma. He had stolen my van, and as he was driving from San Francisco
toward LA, it broke down in front of the ranch where the Manson
group was living, and the girls came out and asked him to move in with them,
and that’s how he got mixed up with Charlie—a kind of devilish plotting
goes into all this. I’m sorry about how it worked out, but he made his own
decisions. He was a smart kid, too. But he was taking a lot of acid and just
got oª on a tangent.
Once he was in prison,we exchanged letters, and then I went to visit him—
just a couple of times because I don’t like hearing those metal doors slam
behind me. Actually, it was easier to be friends with Bobby once he was inside.
Through Bobby I became friends with the chief psychiatrist at the California
prison system—Dr. Minerva Bertholt—and Minerva had taken a liking
to Bobby, who had expressed an interest in continuing with his music.
She arranged for him to do that. He made his own guitar in prison; he knew
how to carve it and how to string it—he had made several musical instruments.
When he heard I was finishing Lucifer, he volunteered to do the music.
Through Minerva we were able to record the track in prison. I furnished
Bobby with timing sheets, and a workprint that he was able to see on the
projector they had there, and I donated a tape recorder, quite a good one,
a Nagra, to the prison—because you can’t take things in and out. I guess
they still have it. The other musicians you hear on the track were in mostly
for drug oªenses. Several of them had been involved in well-known music
groups in San Francisco; they were professional musicians who had made
a mistake and ended up behind bars. Bobby, of course, had a murder conviction,
so he’s still in, but I think some of the others are out now.
MacDonald: I know you have several projects under way. You sent me
a video of a very rough version of a film about the Hitler Youth, called Ich
Will.
Anger: Ich Will is a work in progress. It’s already quite changed from what
you saw. I’ve dropped a lot of the marching. I’m trying to get access to the
original prints of the Hitler Youth films, some of which are with the Imperial
War Museum in London. They’re on 35mm. The museum has said that
it would be okay for me to do something with that material, but it’s the cost
that’s stopping me.
I’m interested in the kind of bonding that was going on in the Hitler Jugend,
and the way the Nazis exploited that bonding by creating rituals out
of the boys being presented with their daggers and similar ceremonies. This
kind of thing also exists in the Boy Scouts and in many groupings in many
diªerent cultures—but Hitler and the Nazis gave it its most sinister twist.
The propaganda films that were made about the Nazi Youth are fascinating
source material to work from.
MacDonald: The most recent finished film of yours that I’ve seen is The
Man We Want to Hang [2002], the film about the show of Aleister Crowley’s
drawings and paintings. It’s not your first film about Crowley.
Anger: That’s true: Thelema Abbey [1955] was about his villa in Cefalù,
Sicily, which he called his “abbey.” He had painted murals on the walls of
his bedroom and called it Le chambre de cauchmars, the Room of Nightmares.
I went there and restored the murals, which had been whitewashed
after he was kicked out of Sicily by Mussolini’s police in the early twenties.
The murals were considered obscene, and they were deliberately obscene in
some cases, like the one he called The Scarlet Woman Being Mounted by a
Goat. And there were an images of Pan with an erect phallus. It was typical
of Crowley to do things like that. I made a documentary on the abbey,
which I didn’t own because it was paid for by this magazine called Picture
Post. In the fifties in England, Picture Post had a television program, and
they paid me to make the film. It was a documentary, a straightforward explanation
of what I was doing there.While I was in Cefalù, Dr. Kinsey came
to visit me. He knew about Crowley and had already collected his books,
and he wanted to see what these erotic murals were.
It was quite an interesting documentary, but by the time I got to England,
it had disappeared; the company had gone out of existence. I said,
“Well, what did you do with all the television films that were shown on this
series?” They said, “We don’t know; they were probably thrown out.” Nobody
thought to save anything.
The Man We Want to Hang is a documentation of an exhibit of Crowley’s
drawings and paintings, shown at the October Gallery in 1995 in London.
I own some of the drawings you see; a large collection of Crowley’s
work was bought by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and other paintings and
drawings came from Crowley collectors, some as far away as Australia. It
was a unique chance to have a good selection of Crowley’s work all together
because this kind of show had never been done before. I had permission to
film it, and I filmed in the gallery. I was showing the work as if you were
wandering through the gallery.
MacDonald: How did you decide on the title?
Anger: The title of the show, and of the film, is taken from a headline in
the notorious British tabloid Sunday Express, which was published in the
1920s by Lord Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook was an enemy of Crowley, and
whenever he needed a sensational story, he’d do one about Crowley being
a cannibal or something equally absurd.When Crowley was in Cefalù and
a student from Oxford died there, from typhoid, the Sunday Express story
had it that the student was sacrificed. The headline of the editorial in the
Sunday Express, denouncing Crowley as the wickedest man in the world,
was “The Man We Want to Hang.” Crowley was amused by it.
My title is an obvious pun: “The Man We Want to Hang” is about hanging
pictures: everything in the film is a picture. My film is a “Pictures at an
Exhibition.”
MacDonald: I assume what drew you to Crowley was that his religion
allowed for a spirituality that was nonexclusionary in terms of gods and
spirits.
Anger: Basically Crowley created a pagan revival. He blew the dust oª
figures like Osiris and Isis and Horus, in the Egyptian pantheon. Horus is
the solar god with the hawk head that Crowley identified as his personal
god. He called the age that we’re in right now “The Age of Horus,” which
replaces “The Age of Osiris,” which represented the Christian age. He believed
that we go through diªerent cycles, two thousand years each.
I want to tell you about my newest project, about a diªerent sort of art
collection. The film will be called Mouse Heaven. Last year I applied for a
grant from Media Arts, one of the Rockefeller cultural activities, to do a
film about an extraordinary collection of Disney toys owned by Eunice and
Mel Birnkrant. Their home is like a private museum. In fact, they don’t want
me to tell exactly where they live because they’re afraid the place will be broken
into. A few days ago I learned that I got the grant, thirty-five thousand
dollars.
Mouse Heaven will have the theme of the iconic Mickey Mouse. It’ll be
a twenty-minute film. I have to decide whether I’m going to do it on film—
and, if so, in 35mm or 16mm—or in digital. Everything seems to be pointing
toward digital. You’ve got to pick up all of the detail of these toys, so I
want a medium that will give me absolute razor-sharp clarity.
I want to show Mouse Heaven at film festivals, and I’ve noticed that festivals
usually have a hard time with 16mm.When I had a show in Argentina
at the Mar del Plata Film Festival last year, they seemed to have only one
old classroom 16mm Bell & Howell projector—in all of Argentina! I said,
“Is this all you’ve got?!” And they only had a five-hundred-watt bulb. I told
them, “It should be twice as bright.” But I just had to put up with it; they
still seemed to like my films, even dimly projected.
It’s too bad about 16mm, but most amateurs who used to have 16mm
projectors and cameras to film the baby and so forth have moved on to video.
They don’t realize that twenty years from now, when they want to look at
what they’ve shot, all they’ll have is snow. The magnetic image is fugitive,
and it will disappear more quickly than film.
MacDonald: Why Mickey Mouse?
Anger:Well, I’m very fond of Mickey Mouse. He meant a lot to me as a
child. I had a Mickey Mouse stuªed doll, and wind-up toys, and got my
parents to take me to the movies whenever a Disney Silly Symphony came
out. I think Mickey Mouse is one of the most important icons of American
pop culture, though the real Mickey has been lost. He was sentimentalized
from Fantasia [1940] on. The early Mickey Mouse had pie eyes; and
they changed the eyes. Basically the Disney people have lost him as a character.
He’s become the chairman of the board.
MacDonald: He was pretty outrageous at the beginning.
Anger: He was a mischievous little demon—that’s why I liked him.
I’ve talked to a lawyer, and since I’m filming a collection of antique toys,
I can call it Mouse Heaven and have the real Mickey Mouse as my star and
main character without a problem. The collection includes everything from
six-inch bisque figures to wind-up toys made of tin, made in the thirties in
Germany, before Hitler banned Mickey Mouse as a decadent rat. From 1928
to 1933, the Germans were making wonderful tin toys that you could wind
up: Mickey plays drums or he marches around. Mel Birnkrant has these toys,
and they still work. Of course, he doesn’t let anybody touch them, because
they’re very fragile. He’ll wind them up, and I’ll film them. I have some tin
toys in Scorpio Rising, if you remember; this has been an ongoing interest.
MacDonald: The video of The Mighty Civic [1992], Peter Wells and Stewart
Main’s documentary about the Civic Theater in Aukland, New Zealand,
has a “Kenneth Anger Presents”on it.What’s your connection to that project.
It’s a very sweet film.
Anger: Isn’t it?
I met Peter and Stewart when I was invited to a film festival in Sidney;
they showed me the film, and I liked it and asked if I could buy the video
rights for America. They agreed, and I paid them a thousand dollars. It’s
the only time I’ve ever done that.
MacDonald: The style of their film is reminiscent of your work.
Anger: I felt an a‹nity for it, and they had apparently seen something
of mine—I don’t know what. They’ve since made a feature, a costume drama
[Desperate Remedies, 1993].
I still have a few copies of The Mighty Civic, and I’m willing to sell those
that I have left, but I don’t really want to pursue it further. [Canyon Cinema—
see filmography—distributes The Mighty Civic in VHS.] I sold copies of the
film to members of the Theater Historical Society, an American organization
interested in preserving old theaters. Old theaters are one of my hobbies.
I’m a member of the Theater Historical Society.We go on what we call
“a conclave” each summer in some region and look at surviving old theaters
and, when we can, try to figure out ways to save them.
It’s hard to believe that at one point in the seventies there was actually
a plan afoot to close Radio City Music Hall and convert it into o‹ces. And
we had a petition-signing campaign to save it. In LA some of those grand
movie palaces are left, like the Pantages, which was the first art deco theater
in LA; it opened in 1930. The Million Dollar is still there on Broadway,
and the Los Angeles can be rented to filmmakers; it’s been used in
quite a few films. And the United Artists has been turned into an Evangelical
church, but they didn’t paint out the murals, so on one side, instead
of the Virgin Mary, they have Mary Pickford. It’s nice that they kept the
original decor.
At one time I contemplated doing a poetic documentary about old theaters;
I had my title: “Temples of Babylon.” And I found some great ones.
It still could be done, but it’s exceedingly di‹cult to light and photograph
those huge spaces. Of course, now with the much faster emulsions and with
video and digital you can practically film in the dark.
MacDonald: I might be the last generation to have that big-theater experience,
with the organ and sometimes an orchestra, and thousands of people
in the theater with you.
Wind-up toy motorcyclists in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963).
Courtesy David. E. James.
Anger: I loved it. I had some great big-theater experiences when I was a
kid and appreciated them for what they were. It was like going to a cathedral.
MacDonald: How much experimental film do you see these days?
Anger: Not very much. I don’t have much access to it. I do like the fact
that living in LA oªers the happy option of going to revivals; they’ve just
done a series at the Egyptian on all of the Orson Welles material, including
his own unfinished projects and an early film that was incorporated into a
stage production. Those retrospectives are valuable, and there are very few
places in America where you can see them.
MacDonald: Did you know Brakhage?
Anger: Yes. Stan was quite a good friend of mine. And I admired him
for what he accomplished. We knew each other over a twenty-five-year
period. He had a collection of prints of my films, including some earlier
versions of things, and after he died, his wife wondered what to do with them,
and I said, “I’ll take them back if you don’t know what to do with them.”
So she sent me a package of prints. I miss Stan.
MacDonald: Every once in a while I hear a rumor that volume 3 of Hollywood
Babylon is under way . . .
Anger: It’s been roughed in, but the recent crop of Hollywood people are
kind of a blank to me. I mean I have to like the people I write about, even
though I can also hate them; I have to be emotionally involved at least on
some level. The current “stars” just draw a blank, and frankly a lot of them
are a blank. Anyway, I don’t know whether I’ll do another book or not.
MacDonald: Have those books been a substantial source of income for
you?
Anger: For quite a while. They’ve been translated into Japanese, German,
Italian, and French, and so I still get royalties from those translations. I did
the books so I would have an income, and they turned out to provide more
of an income than my films ever have. Even though my films are rented quite
consistently, I still don’t get enough money from them to live on or to make
new films.
I’ve been lucky to have had a sponsor in my life,my friend Sir Paul Getty,
who is recently deceased. I was going to do a film on his private cricket
ground. The film was to be called Arrangement in White on Green, a title
taken from Whistler. Sir Paul had approved the project. His cricket ground
is the most beautiful in England; it’s on the estate of his country house near
Oxford. The film would have been forty-five minutes long, and the music
was to be Symphony no. 3 by Sir Edward Elgar. I had the great good fortune
of having Jack Cardiª agree to be my cameraman (he was the cameraman
for Michael Powell’s masterpieces, The Red Shoes [1948] and Black
Narcissis [1947], and a director in his own right). Jack is in his late eighties,
but still very spry and perfectly lucid, and he agreed to work with me. The
whole project was planned very carefully, but Sir Paul died, and since I was
doing it for him—he was a great cricket fan and had introduced the game
to me. I’ve put the project on hold.
I’m fascinated with cricket because of its Celtic roots and the little mysterious
things in the game that go back to pagan rituals. The “white” in the
title is the white uniforms, and the green is the grass. Sir Paul had his own
cricket team, “Getty’s XI,” and I recently got an invitation for this season.
I have to go to London in September for a show of frame enlargements from
Invocation of My Demon Brother—at the Modern Art Gallery in London—
and I may talk to Sir Paul’s widow, Victoria Getty, and see what she feels
about my filming some of the matches. Channel 4 has also expressed some
interest in the project.
Arrangement in White on Green will probably become another addition
to what I call my “graveyard” of films I wish I could have made. I’m not a
good hustler; I’m not talented at rounding up financing. If I had more of
the ruthless fighter in my nature, I suppose I would have gone after these
things a little harder—but that’s not my character. As I’ve said, I’m not obsessed
with these unrealized projects; if I were, I’d be adding my name to
David Frazier’s suicide book! Some things work out; some don’t. On several
occasions I had hopes of making a feature-length film, but I don’t have
a name that is “bankable”: I’m known as an avant-garde artist, which is
something quite diªerent—something I’m content to be.
By; Scott MacDonald
It is an understatement to claim that the films of director David Fincher are reminiscent of classical film noir. The canonical texts written on the subject, notably Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” (1955) and Paul Schrader's “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), read like 'how to' guides for understanding films like Alien 3, Seven, Fight Club, and to a lesser extent The Game and Panic Room. Schrader points out that “film noir's techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness.” (1) If this is true, Fincher has created a series of films that are anything but meaningless. His slick and glossy treatment of a dark world frequently garners accusations that his films are shallow experiments in style. It is more accurate to say that Fincher absorbs the fleeting styles and tastes of Hollywood, reflects them, and twists them. He pulls back the curtain, revealing a mechanical process at the core of the filmmaker's art, leaving us to wonder how we lost our humanity in something we love so much.
The visual language of the film was carefully planned to nourish the paranoia and isolation of the film's plot. The camera is always looking up at the smooth lines of the neo-gothic interiors, but the angle only makes the film more claustrophobic because the camera never gets far enough away to make us feel comfortable with the surroundings. Even if we weren't always so close to everything, it's unlikely it would make any difference. As the film's cinematographer, Alex Thompson, pointed out, “Fincher was always saying 'Keep it dark, keep it dark!'” making it very difficult for him to maintain any sort of color in the image. (6) The end result is a gritty, chiaroscuro sepia that doesn't let up.
In Fight Club the American Dream that the narrator has followed all his life is an illusion; the remnants of it hang in the form of faded or bleached flags over the attendees at testicular cancer meetings or in the command center of “Project Mayhem”. Such a situation, some would argue, could lead to a loss of one's identity. The narrator's identity crisis and his insomnia lead him to narrate the entire film as a list of alternating tragedies and banalities. Two of the structuring principles of film noir, the flashback and the voiceover, reflect the narrator's confusion, cynicism, and narcissism. The narrator's reason for telling us this story is the same as his reason for attending the self-help groups. He tells Marla, the ostensible femme fatale, “When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you instead of….” “Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak,” she says, finishing his sentence. The narrator finds in us a receptive audience.
