“A Love Vision”: Kenneth Anger in 1967

Art by Rick Griffin with Gustave Doré. San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1 No. 7, February 1967.

In his later years Kenneth Anger often seemed to spend more time giving interviews than making films, even though he was keeping busy when out of the public eye. Most of the discussions cover familiar ground, recycling anecdotes about the creation of the Magick Lantern Cycle, and the people who contributed to the films. More interesting—and harder to find—are interviews from the time when Anger was still at work on his magnum opus, which is why this radio interview from 1967 is a very welcome discovery:

John Cott, host of the Coconut Grove show on KPFA, and co-hosts Tom Luddy and Juris Svendsen interview Kenneth Anger about his latest film, Lucifer Rising. At the time of the interview, Anger had not yet begun shooting Lucifer Rising; he discusses his vision for the film as a sequel to Scorpio Rising, talks about the film’s magick symbolism. The hosts play a tape of Anger performing an invocation for the film. He is joined in the studio by Gary (?), who is introduced as the star of the film, and Joy (no last name given), who plays music in the background throughout the interview and performs a song from the film. They are also briefly joined by author and critic Susan Sontag, who discusses her love of Anger’s films.

KPFA is a listener-funded radio station serving the San Francisco Bay area which is still active today. The interview, which is really more of a round-table discussion, took place in July 1967, when the “Summer of Love” was in full swing. Susan Sontag’s presence surprised me, I’ve never seen her mention Anger’s films anywhere yet here she is, declaring him to be the greatest living American director. She’s only there for a third of the discussion but during this time Juris Svendsen tries to isolate what it is that makes her regard Anger’s films so highly. Later on the conversation turns to the youthful demographic referred to as “the Love Generation”, a cohort who the participants all discuss as something separate from themselves. Kenneth Anger was 40 in 1967 yet he talks sympathetically about the youth of the day, seeing the hippies as catching up with many of the impulses that drove avant-gardists like himself in the 1950s: the growing interest in occultism, the disregard for the demands of “straight” society, and all forms of psychotropic exploration. When the discussion turns to Lucifer Rising, Anger emphasises the subtitle that appears on the film’s promotional poster by Rick Griffin: “A Love Vision”. It’s tempting to read this as opportunism, especially when the subtitle was missing from the film that was eventually released in 1980, but Anger regarded the original Lucifer Rising as an answer to the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising. Here, as elsewhere, he emphasises the positive aspects of Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, while love was an important component of the Thelemic philosophy which Anger followed: “Love is the law, love under will.”

Art by Randy Salas.

Anger sounds relatively positive himself in the radio discussion but the rambling, unofficial biography by Bill Landis describes a not-so-love-filled atmosphere at the Russian Embassy in San Francisco where Bobby Beausoleil was supposed to be playing the part of Lucifer. I tend to be wary of the Landis account, he certainly did his research but isn’t always accurate, and some of the people he talked to (Anger wasn’t among them) would have been pushing their own agendas. A few months after the KPFA interview Anger and Beausoleil staged an occult ceremony/theatrical happening/musical concert at San Francisco’s Straight Theater. I used to think that the name of Beausoleil’s band, The Magickal Powerhouse of Oz, was a reference to Aleister Crowley’s Liber OZ (aka Liber LXXVII), a one-page distillation of the Law of Thelema which Anger happens to read out towards the end of the KPFA discussion. The band used the Crowlean spelling of Magick in their name but the Oz is merely a reference to the books by L. Frank Baum.

Berkeley Barb, Volume 5, Issue 12, Sept. 29–Oct. 5, 1967.

Fragments of the Equinox of the Gods performance may be the ones that appear in Invocation of My Demon Brother (Landis isn’t clear) but we do know that Anger’s 1969 film is made up of leftover footage from the original Lucifer Rising. The reporting here is confused by conflicting claims: Anger said that most of the original Lucifer footage was stolen from a car after the Straight Theater show; Beausoleil said that it was mainly equipment that was stolen since Anger hadn’t shot much film in the first place. Whatever the truth of the matter, the theft was reported as a news story in The Berkeley Barb at the end of September, something I was pleased to find while researching all of the above. I doubt that Anger would have gone to the press over a trivial loss but this is all rather academic now. Needless to say, whoever the thieves were they didn’t return Anger’s film which he why he spent the next decade remaking Lucifer Rising from scratch. Before he took off for London, however, he posted an ad in the Village Voice melodramatically announcing the end of his film-making career. I’ve always felt the thieves helped Anger rather than hindered him, even though he obviously wouldn’t have agreed at the time. The loss of the footage forced him to create a shorter film that wouldn’t otherwise have existed, one in which the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising is filtered through the hippy era to channel the growing negativity at the end of the decade: Vietnam, the Manson murders (in which Bobby Beausoleil was implicated), and Altamont (in which Mick Jagger was implicated), where the relatively harmless bikers of Scorpio Rising have been replaced by Hells Angels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual
• Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally