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Symbolist? Arguably. Decadent? Certainly. Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) again this weekend I thought it worth making note of some of these resonances. The real age of Symbolist cinema was the Silent Era from around 1910 onwards, something I discussed in more detail here. That being so, several films made since can be taken [...]

Kenneth Anger poster (2009). Alia Penner, like Arik Roper, is another talented member of the omniversal Arthur posse as well as being an illustrator, designer and photographer in her own right. Her title designs opened the Missoni promotional film which Kenneth Anger directed earlier this year, and her work on paper follows a distinctly psychedelic [...]

I did have another Ludwig post planned for today but that’s been set aside for a different kind of fabulosity following the news that Kenneth Anger has made a new film. Yes, jaws hit the floor… Italian fashion house Missoni commissioned Anger to make a short promo for their Fall/Winter collection and you can see [...]

Curtis Harrington. House of Harrington is a short documentary from 2008 about the late filmmaker Curtis Harrington which has just been posted to YouTube by its makers, and by a curious coincidence this appearance occurs in the week of Dennis Hopper’s death. Harrington gave Hopper the lead in his debut feature Night Tide (1961) at [...]

One of the entries from the Greenpeace competition to rebrand BP. • What Kenneth Anger was doing inside the Pentagon, October 1967. • Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of Alienation. Jim Rossignol on Stalker: the film, the game and the reality. • Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s visionary music. A blog and [...]

Kenneth Anger: ‘No, I am not a Satanist’ | Anger interviewed.

It’s that man again… Following on the heels of the occult-themed Strange Attractor Salon (which is running events throughout this month, it should be noted; tickets here), the Sprüth Magers gallery, London, has a Kenneth Anger exhibition opening on February 19th based around Anger’s delirious short film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and his [...]

“There is no why for my making films. I just liked the twitters of the machine, and since it was an extension of painting for me, I tried it and loved it. In painting I never liked the staid and static, always looked for what would change the source of light and stance, using glitters, [...]

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, California, Composite (1954). This portrait of a dashing Kenneth Anger juxtaposes the filmmaker with an engraving by Gustave Doré for Paradise Lost. Like his contemporary Emil Cadoo, photographer Edmund Teske (1911–1996) often concealed the homoerotic nature of his pictures by rendering them “artistic” through double-exposure. Teske was friends with rock group [...]

Looking at Willy Pogány’s work last week I was reminded that as well as illustrating books he worked in Hollywood for a while as an art director and set designer. Among those jobs was a credit for “Technical staff” on the only film for which director Harry Lachman is remembered today, a curious 1935 melodrama, [...]

left: The Magus from the Thoth Tarot by Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley (1938–1940?); right: The Magus from The Major Arcana by John Coulthart (2006). Phantasmaphile presents another magickal art event in NYC next week. Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot is described as “a personal narrative by Jesse Bransford”, an artist with [...]

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He [...]

Nearly two years after their American release, and not a moment too soon, the films which comprise Kenneth Anger‘s superb Magick Lantern Cycle turn up at last in the UK. Good to see these being produced by the BFI, their previous collections of shorts by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer are distinguished by quality [...]

The appearance of occultist Aleister Crowley on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper is well-documented—here he is looking rather grainy on my CD insert—although I always forget which of the Beatles it was who put him in the list of “people that we like”. I’d guess John Lennon who would have appreciated Crowley’s obscene poetry, copious [...]

Mouse Heaven: Minnie and Mickey. Kenneth Anger’s paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge. Mouse Heaven is a distinctly minor piece, an awkward mix of film and video which juxtaposes shots of mouse figurines with a song-based soundtrack. Scorpio Rising this isn’t but the [...]

Watching the Kenneth Anger DVDs last week (which really are superb, by the way, and should be on the Christmas shopping lists of anyone interested in underground cinema) had me hunting around for more of the kind of period imagery one sees in his Scorpio Rising (1964) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), imagery that’s erotic [...]

Self-portrait by Austin Osman Spare (1907). A late discovery but worth a mention, an Austin Spare exhibition that’s been running in Glasgow this month. From the press release: An exhibition of 13 prints from this great artist and Occultist will run until 29th September 2007 at Mono, King’s Court, King Street Glasgow. We have a [...]

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If [...]

The first part of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle appeared on DVD in a splendid edition from Fantoma earlier this year. The second and final part is due for release on October 2nd and you can see the mouthwatering trailer here. This new set includes the Cocteau-esque Harlequinade, Rabbit’s Moon (1950); homoerotica, bikers and rock’n’roll [...]

James Campbell in The Guardian this weekend writes about the arrest fifty years ago of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for his publishing Allen Ginsberg’s paean to ecstatic drug use and gay sex, Howl and Other Poems. Ferlinghetti was arrested on charges of selling (or “peddling”, as these prissy turns of phrase always have it) literature likely to [...]