Kenneth Anger – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 677

Design by Neville Brody, 1980.

• My work soundtrack for the past couple of weeks has been non-stop Cabaret Voltaire so this is pertinent. Neville Brody designed many of the group’s record sleeves in the 1980s as well as this poster and another one that I’ve only seen as a small picture in the first Brody book. He was also responsible for the CV logo which I never managed to find in badge form.

• “Anger’s preferred mode of artistry in his last decades was self-mythologising, and while he would return to filmmaking late in life, it was less as hierophant than totem—the worn keepsake of a once powerful magick.” Ryan Meehan remembers Kenneth Anger.

• New music: Waves by Ben Chasny and Rick Tomlinson, Topos by UCC Harlo, and Zango by WITCH.

Kafka’s perpetual redescription of his plight suggests that throughout his writing life he was less interested in finding a solution or even arriving at a single, definitive formulation of the problem than he was in exploring the implications and complications of his situation from new, unexpected angles and crafting an ever-expanding lexicon of figures for its inescapability.

Ross Benjamin, the translator of Franz Kafka’s diaries, on the neurotic concerns that Kafka turned into art

• “Why are men seemingly always naked in ancient Greek art?” Sarah Murray investigates.

• Artists for Bibi: an auction in aid of Arthur Machen’s great-great-granddaughter.

• At Public Domain Review: Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Acorn.

• Old music: Moon Journey by Mort Garson.

• RIP Tony McPhee.

• Kafka (1964) by The Rowdies | Kafka (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya | Kafka (Main Title) (1992) by Cliff Martinez

Weekend links 675

Lucifer (1890) by Franz Stuck.

• “I wanted to reclaim the word ‘psychonauts’ and take it back into the 19th century, where it describes not only renegades and rebels, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the literary establishment. The word that was used at the time was “self-experimenter.” Mike Jay (again) talking to Steve Paulson about psychoactive research and the scientists who taste their own medicine.

• “How did countercultures commune before the internet?” asks J. Hoberman, reviewing Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965–1973 by David Jacob Kramer.

• At Public Domain Review: Medieval advice concerning the mythical Bonnacon: “the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels”.

• DJ Food unearths posters and badges for The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived Los Angeles music venue of the late 60s.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Gaku Yamazaki has documented thousands of unusual road signs across Japan.

• New music: Psalm013: Unland by Pram of Dogs, and Intimaa by Bana Haffar.

• At Unquiet Things: A sneak peek from the forthcoming The Art of Fantasy.

• The Strange World of…Shirley Collins.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Posner Day.

• Kenneth Anger: a life in pictures.

• RIP Tina Turner.

• Kaleidoscope (1967) by Kaleidoscope (UK) | Kaleidoscope (1984) by Rain Parade | Collideascope (1987) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear

Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon (composite with Gustave Doré engraving) (1954) by Edmund Teske.

The other day…I had a date with Tom Luddy at a New York hotel in the East Fifties to meet Kenneth Anger, the genius who made Scorpio Rising and whose New York flat is a shrine to Valentino.

Michael Powell, from A Life in Movies, 1986

There’s not much I can add to all the plaudits, especially when Kenneth Anger has been a continual fixture here since 2007, with the last post about him going up only two weeks ago. I always find it impossible to make one of those lists where people name their ten favourite films but Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle is one of the very few titles I could add to such a list, and it probably sits in the top five. What the other four might be depends on changes of mood or weather.

The most Anger recent post came about after I’d been re-reading the unofficial Bill Landis biography, a book I’d dipped into over the years but not gone all the way through again since it was published in 1995. It’s an uneven study of Anger’s life and erratic career, detailed yet slapdash, but Landis did at least interview many of Anger’s colleagues and acquaintances while they were still around. Even though Anger himself hated the results of the often gossipy investigation the book will remain an invaluable resource for future writers.

Some links:
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1991). In which Nigel Finch persuaded a reluctant Anger to drive around Los Angeles in a hearse visiting sites of death or disaster mentioned in Anger’s first book. I suspect Finch was more interested in discussing Anger’s films, which are also featured, but needed the scandalous stuff to get the thing made at all. The BBC hadn’t done anything about Anger before this, and haven’t done anything since.

• Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms (1970), a 53-minute documentary made for WDR by Reinhold E. Thiel. A frustrating film, being a mix of awkward interviews (Anger didn’t like Herr Thiel very much) with priceless footage showing the filming of parts of Lucifer Rising. A shame, then, that all the copies which have been circulating for the past decade are low-grade and blighted throughout by one of those proprietary signatures that idiots stick onto footage they don’t own. WDR must still have the film so maybe we’ll get to see a better copy one day.

• Sex, Satanism, Manson, Murder, and LSD: Kenneth Anger tells his tale. Paul Gallagher recounts his own meetings with Anger and also posts several Anger-related pages from Kinokaze zine, 1993.

• Hollywood Bohemia: An interview with Kenneth Anger by AL Bardach for Wet magazine, 1980.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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

Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966

Here’s a rare thing: Kenneth Anger’s programme (PDF) for a Spring Equinox screening of his films in New York in 1966, an event that saw the first public appearance of Magick Lantern Cycle as a collective title. This small publication is described at some length by Bill Landis in the unauthorised Anger biography, while the cover design appears on the first page of the booklet inside the BFI collection of Anger’s films. There are 13 pages in the scan, the original item being a collection of loose sheets inside a folded cover.

Among the many points of interest are Anger’s evocative production notes and dedications for the films, comments which have been recycled ever since in articles about the director and his work. There’s also a page of biographical detail which includes a list of Anger’s preferences and interests, a Crowley-style piece of hyperbolic self-description, and a collage bearing the title The Golden Grope of Marilyn Monroe. The latter features a Gustave Doré illustration which prefigures the appropriation of Doré for the first Lucifer Rising poster.

This being early 1966, LSD was hip and still legal, so the screening information suggests the ideal time for psychedelic voyagers in the audience to ingest their sugar cubes. The evening was to begin with the Anger Aquarian Arcanum, a prelude comprising a display of various magical symbols and iconography. Some writers have taken this to be a lost film but Landis says it was a slide show, presumably with Anger’s explanatory commentary. Enough of the programmes for the event were printed that you can still find them for sale today, although if you want to buy one the cheaper copies start at around £500.

Continue reading “Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966”

Into the Midnight Underground

Browsing Vimeo recently I found a film by Anna Thew, Cling Film, which I remembered seeing years ago on Midnight Underground, a TV series devoted to avant-garde cinema. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) for eight weeks in 1993, with each episode being screened shortly after midnight. The presenter was the always reliable Benjamin Woolley, sitting before a backdrop resembling one of Verner Panton’s psychedelic environments from where he introduced the cinematic offerings, an eclectic blend of avant-garde and experimental films, unusual dramas plus a couple of animations. Episodes ran for around an hour, with each installment following a different theme. The films were a mix of the old and the new: “classics” (for want of a better term) of underground cinema set alongside more recent works. This was very much a television equivalent of the screenings of avant-garde cinema which Film and Video Umbrella had been touring around Britain’s arthouses since the mid-1980s; one of the founders of FVU, Michael O’Pray, is thanked in the series credits. Midnight Underground was so tailored to my interests at the time it was easy to feel like this was being screened for my benefit alone. I taped everything as it was broadcast but I never got round to digitising all the episodes, so that many of the films shown there, Cling Film included, I haven’t seen for a long time.

Benjamin Woolley.

The discovery of Anna Thew’s film set me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate the contents of Midnight Underground via links to various video sites. Since this post exists, the answer is obviously yes, or almost… Of the 44 films shown in the series only 5 are currently unavailable, with one more being limited to an extract and another as pay-to-view. This was a much better result than I expected, especially for works with such a limited appeal. The majority of the films shown in the series were being screened on British TV for the first time, also the last time for most of them. In 1993 Channel 4 was still maintaining its original brief, offering a genuine alternative to the programming on the other three terrestrial channels. As I’ve often complained here, this didn’t last; the underground remained underground. Woolley’s series was a brief taste of a televisual world where the concept of diversity could apply to form and content as well as identity. It’s a world the corporate channels will never show you, one you have to find for yourself.

* * *

1: Strange Spirits
The opening episode shows why I felt they were broadcasting this for me alone. Derek Jarman’s grainy film of a Throbbing Gristle performance is probably the first (and only?) time the group appeared on British TV. This was the first surprise. The second one was Kenneth Anger’s film being shown with its Janácek score. I’d seen this at an FVU screening a couple of years before with its ELO soundtrack, the so-called “Eldorado Edition”, which Anger later discarded. As for Daina Krumins’ weird and creepy religiose short, I expected this one to be unavailable but the director now has several of her films on YouTube. Don’t miss her even-weirder animated slime moulds, Babobilicons. The angel in Maggie Jailler’s film is artist (and Jarman/TG associate) Cerith Wyn Evans.

• TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (Derek Jarman, 1981)
• The Divine Miracle (Daina Krumins, 1973)
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
• L’ange frénétique (Maggie Jailler, 1985)

2: Music for the Eye and Ear
Bruce Conner’s films are continually elusive on the internet, especially those made to accompany music by Devo and Eno & Byrne. The version of Mongoloid linked here differs slightly from the original but it’s essentially the same film. Versailles II is taped from the Midnight Underground broadcast, and includes Benjamin Woolley’s introduction.

• Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
• Mongoloid (Bruce Conner, 1978)
• Versailles II (Chris Garratt, 1976)
• Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (Quay Brothers, 1992)
• All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

3: New Sexualities
Stephen Dwoskin’s film is the one that shows a close-up of a woman’s face during the act of masturbation. This is paralleled later in the series by Antony Balch’s masturbatory self-portrait in Towers Open Fire. Cling Film is all about safe sex, and was broadcast in a slightly amended form to avoid being too explicit. The version on Vimeo is uncensored.

• Kiss (Chris Newby, 1992) (no video)
• Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965)
• Cling Film (Anna Thew, 1993)
• Stain (Simon Pummell, 1992)
• Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
• 6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion Otto Mühl) (Kurt Kren, 1964)
• Moment (Stephen Dwoskin, 1969)

4: London Suite
Sundial and Mile End Purgatorio have both appeared here before as a result of my seeing them on Midnight Underground.

• Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 1992)
• Sundial (William Raban, 1993)
• The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987) (pay-to-view)
• Mile End Purgatorio (Guy Sherwin, 1991)
• London Suite (Vivienne Dick, 1989) (no video)

Continue reading “Into the Midnight Underground”