Kenneth Anger, R.I.P. (1927-2023)

From Andrew Pulver's 5-24-23 GUARDIAN obit entitled "Kenneth Anger, underground film-maker and Hollywood Babylon author, dies aged 96":

Kenneth Anger, the artist and film-maker whose work offered a distinctively radical mix of paganism and homoeroticism, has died aged 96. Art gallery Sprüth Magers confirmed his death, saying: “Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant garde art scenes of the later 20th century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture.”

Anger’s films, which included Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1972), made him a key figure in the counterculture over four decades, and later a hero to subsequent generations of film-makers grappling with similar themes. While he never found commercial success through his films, his book Hollywood Babylon – a compendium of often sleazy and largely unverifiable gossip about the film industry – became famous after first being published in 1959; it was followed by a sequel in 1984.

 To read the entire obit, click HERE. 

Kenneth Anger's 

The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

From Peter Bradshaw's 5-24-23 GUARDIAN article entitled "Kenneth Anger: Tinseltown’s Outrageous Magus of Occult Desire":

Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.

But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre maudit to go with the films maudits. Anger’s genius was to present his delirious work, with all its horrendous squalor and grainy black-and-white tabloid-style photos, and whose content he later claimed to have intuited through telepathy, as a nonfictional history of scandals about legendary stars, the sort of thing withheld by the Hollywood PR machine which everyone knew had long been ruthlessly suppressing scandal and creating bowdlerised biographical accounts of actors and actresses rolling off the star machine production line.

With a straight face, Anger presented what was effectively a satanic version of a theologian’s Lives of the Saints: all the horribly juicy gossip about Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Mary Astor, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe and many more, with all the abortions, drug addictions and sexual indulgences. This book was the foundation stone of the gossip industry, a subversive, black-comic slapstick sketch in Anger’s very own theatre of cruelty, taking aim at the solemn way the movie industry demanded its audience believe in that piety of supposed family values which had been imposed on the business after the Hays Code was brought in in the wake of the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal.

Actually, Anger’s book should be seen as a brilliant satirical fiction, a séance of horror, communing with the spirits of unhappiness and excess floating unacknowledged around Los Angeles. Alternatively it is a kind of reference book slash pulp novel which does in fact have something to say about the toll being taken on the ordinary human beings chewed up and spat out by Hollywood.

To read the entire article, click HERE.