Steven Arnold – { feuilleton }

Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual

Writing about Steven Arnold last week I was wondering whether Arnold and Kenneth Anger had ever crossed paths. Anger moved to San Francisco in 1966 in order to channel the counter-cultural ferment into the film that would eventually become Lucifer Rising. I’m sure he must have been aware of Arnold’s midnight movie shows but if so there’s no mention of Arnold in the Bill Landis Anger biography.

When Anger died two years ago I posted links to some of the better online material related to the film-maker and his works. One of these was a German TV profile, Kenneth Anger–Magier des Untergrundfilms, a 53-minute documentary made in 1970 by Reinold E. Thiel for German TV channel WDR. The post included my complaint about the only copy of the film being blighted by an obtrusive graphic fixed to the footage by the person who uploaded it to YouTube a decade ago. The copy was further spoiled by burned-in subtitles but I felt sure that a better version would turn up eventually, and here we are with Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual, the same film under a different title, and free of obtrusive graphics. (There’s still that “WDR” in the corner but they paid for the damned thing so their proprietorial logo is at least justified.)

As a guide to Anger’s cinema, Thiel’s film only skates over the surface, with Anger being interviewed in piecemeal fashion, and explaining his work and magical philosophy to the camera. He doesn’t seem very happy in any of these sequences but WDR had paid to help with his own film so he was obliged to co-operate. We’re fortunate that they did. Thiel’s film is most valuable for having been made when Anger was shooting new scenes for Lucifer Rising in London. As far as I’m aware, this is the only documentary that shows Anger at work on any of the Magick Lantern films. The discussion of his career includes a mention of Rabbit’s Moon, the lost footage of which had been discovered in Paris but not yet pieced together into its finished form. The shots we see here are more rarities, being raw footage, untinted and unedited. The same goes for some of the shots from Lucifer Rising which include brief moments that didn’t make it to the final cut.

Anger had moved to London following his aborted attempts to make Lucifer Rising in San Francisco, a period which saw his first choice for the role of Lucifer remove himself from the production by means of suicide. His second choice, Bobby Beausoleil, fell out with Anger and stole most of the existing footage before being imprisoned for life as a result of his involvement with the Manson murders. The London phase of the film’s production was much more fruitful. In addition to the WDR funds and assistance from the Rolling Stones’ photographer, Michael Cooper, Anger was given a small grant by the BFI which helped pay for the sequences filmed in Germany and Egypt. Thiel’s footage shows Anger and assistants filming shots of the basement ritual with Aleister Crowley’s magic circle painted on the floor. Anger’s third Lucifer, Leslie Huggins, left the film before it was finished but we get to see him in several sequences, including shots of him wearing his “Lucifer” jacket. Thiel inadvertently clears up one minor mystery by revealing that the white-haired, ermine-robed Francis Cyril Rose is saying “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” to Huggins’ Lucifer during the ritual. In the finished Lucifer Rising we see Rose’s lips moving but the only words you ever hear in Anger’s films are the lyrics in the songs he uses.

Leslie Huggins doesn’t say a word either, even when Anger is directing his actions during the later sequences shot among the standing stones of Avebury, the same stones that would summon Derek Jarman to their circle a year later. Avebury’s megaliths have cultivated a great deal of mystery and legend but their aura is dispersed a little when you can hear an endless procession of motor traffic going by in the background. Anger shoots the stones from a low angle to make them seem more impressive, and also keep a flock of curious sheep out of the frame. Another minor mystery in Lucifer Rising was the shot of Huggins standing by the stones while making conjuring gestures towards a very stormy sky. Was the dark sky a special effect like some of the other shots in the film? Thiel reveals it to be a genuine Wiltshire thunderstorm which Anger hurries to photograph. The inhabitants of Avebury village were no doubt used to the sight of film crews gathered around the stones—a few years later the village became the location for an entire TV series—but even they must have been surprised by the sight of two film crews arriving simultaneously, with one of them filming the other. Thiel ends on a self-reflexive note, with a shot from Anger’s camera showing the camera filming him.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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</a
• 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

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

One consequence of writing posts like this for the past 19 years is the blossoming into familiarity of previously unknown subjects. Such has been the case with the work of Steven Arnold (1943–1994), an American artist/photographer/film-maker whose photographs I hadn’t seen until I was pointed towards the Steven Arnold Archive by a reader in 2009. (Hi Thom, if you’re out there!) Since that brief post I’ve logged the occasional appearance of Arnold exhibitions and, more recently, the blu-ray release of Arnold’s sole feature film, Luminous Procuress.

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies is a feature-length documentary by Vishnu Dass about Arnold and the circle of friends and collaborators who helped create his films and photographic tableaux. The documentary was released by the Steven Arnold Archive in 2019, and is now freely available for viewing at Vimeo. (The “Mature” tag means you need to either log in or create an account to watch it.) Dass presents a collection of video interviews with Arnold and his associates, together with more recent interviews with surviving friends and enthusiasts, to supply the biographical detail behind Arnold’s extraordinary endeavours. Angelica Huston narrates the film which also includes poignant testimony from Arnold’s close friend, Ellen Burstyn.

The interviews chart the artist’s progress: education in Oakland and San Francisco; his early experiments with film; his experience as a member of Salvador Dalí’s circle of hippy acolytes; the creation of all those beautiful black-and-white photographs in his Los Angeles studio. Arnold is revealed to have been a pioneer even by the elevated standards of San Francisco in the 1960s; he was taking acid in 1964, and at the height of the psychedelic era was cultivating with his friends an attitude of glamorous, polymorphous sexuality and gender play that went beyond the out-gay status of the Beats. In one of the interviews he talks eloquently about his concept of androgyny, which he regarded as an almost spiritual state, an attitude the alchemists of old would have endorsed. Arnold was the founder of San Francisco’s midnight movie shows in 1967, the same shows which saw the birth of the Cockettes, an anything-goes performing troupe who turn up later in Luminous Procuress. I didn’t know that Arnold’s midnight shows (for which he designed the posters) were taking place three years before the screening of El Topo in New York, the event which is usually cited as the origin of the nationwide Midnight Movie trend.

Luminous Procuress was the culmination of his time in San Francisco, and the film that caught the attention of Salvador Dalí when it too was screened in New York. The film is a rare example of Arnold arranging his tableaux in full colour. When he moved to Los Angeles he was living among vividly coloured fabrics and decorations yet all his photographs are high-contrast black-and-white creations. I was hoping we might hear more about the reason for this. Arnold does refer at one point to enjoying the directness of the black-and-white image, and monochrome no doubt made his tableaux arrangement easier if he didn’t have to worry about harmonising colours. But he doesn’t explain the choice in any detail.

This is an inspiring documentary, and a valuable record of a thread of San Francisco’s cultural history which is seldom acknowledged in recountings of the psychedelic era. It’s also a dispiriting portrait when you’re watching another creative life cut short by the AIDS pandemic. When considering histories like these it’s easy to fret over the loss of unrealised works. Better, I think, to appreciate anew the work that remains. (Thanks to Larry for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique
• Luminous Procuress
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold

The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique

Steven Arnold’s first film is a 14-minute fantasia made four years before his debut feature, Luminous Procuress (1971). Like many underground films, The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique is essentially a home movie in which the director’s friends have been encouraged to perform for the camera, but Arnold’s creative personality is strong enough to surmount any production limitations. All the Arnold hallmarks are present: masks, mirrors, reflective objects, baubles, beads, and so on; among the cast is Beat poet Ruth Weiss who also appears in Luminous Procuress. I compared Arnold’s feature to Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and it’s Kenneth Anger’s Bacchanal that comes to mind again here. Where Anger scored his film with Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass, Arnold has an equally bombastic soundtrack that sounds like music from a sword-and-sandal epic. Arnold lacks Anger’s rigorous approach to montage but the general atmosphere is enough to make this seem like one of Anger’s lost films. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Luminous Procuress
• Juliet of the Spirits
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold
• The Tale of Giulietta

Luminous Procuress

How to describe this one? Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, pt 2? Bargain-basement Satyricon? The latter is probably more apt, Kenneth Anger’s longer films are more formal than Luminous Procuress. Steven Arnold’s only feature film resembles something made by the extras from a Fellini extravaganza after they’ve stayed overnight at Cinecittà; a series of artfully-arranged tableaux (artful arrangement being Arnold’s forte), together with a hardcore sex-scene (hetero) that seems out of place beside the relatively chaste antics elsewhere:

Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey. Through strange passageways, one voyages with the Procuress and her charges, glimpsing hidden nightmares and panoplied chambers of revelry, where celebrants, ornately festooned, dance and make love before unseen gods… (more)

Arnold’s film follows the low-budget form by being shot without synchronised sound, so the dialogue, such as it is, has been dubbed on later. Rather than try and match words to the improvised scenes Arnold instead gives his characters foreign voices, most of which are mumbling and may not even be saying anything intelligible in their own language. This spares us any Warhol-like amateur theatricals while augmenting the dream-like atmosphere. The music by Warner Jepson is the icing on a very unusual cake. Jepson was a serious electronic composer whose rather abrasive debut album, Totentanz, was included in the Creel Pone catalogue of electronic obscurities in 2005. For the film Jepson provides swathes of synthesizer doodling interspersed with arrangements for keyboards and voices. All this and the Cockettes too. Salvador Dalí loved it.

Continue reading “Luminous Procuress”

Weekend links 619

A Moog on the Moon by P. Praquin, 1977. And a space helmet reflection to add to the list being accumulated by 70s Sci-Fi Art.

• RIP Klaus “Quadro” Schulze. I’ve owned many of his solo albums over the years, and while they’re historically important for the part they played in developing the kosmische sound in the 1970s I’ve never been very enthusiastic about the music. The albums I prefer are the ones where he was working with others, whether as a drummer in Ash Ra Tempel, an inadvertent member of the fake Cosmic Jokers supergroup, or part of the genuine Cosmic Couriers supergroup that made Tarot. The Tonwelle album credited to “Richard Wahnfried” benefits considerably from the presence of Manuel Göttsching and Michael Schrieve (also a rumoured Carlos Santana); I recommend it. For a taste of the synth-doodling Schulze, here he is in analogue heaven.

• Next month, Luminous Procuress, a film by Steven Arnold (previously), is released for the first time on blu-ray by Second Run: “Exploding out of San Francisco’s vibrant late-60s counter-culture, Luminous Procuress is a psychedelic odyssey of unabashed hedonism. The only feature film by artist, mystic and polymath Steven Arnold, the film celebrates gender-fluidity and pan-sexuality in a voyeuristic phantasmagorical journey towards spiritual ecstasy.”

• “Whereas [Bernard] Herrmann worked predominantly with strings and [John] Carpenter with synths, Anderson wanted to evoke a similar atmosphere with guitars.” Greg “The Lord” Anderson talks to Dan Franklin about making an album of night music.

I am troubled by how often people talk about likability when they talk about art.

I am troubled by how often our protagonists are supposed to live impeccable, sin-free lives, extolling the right virtues in the right order—when we, the audience, do not and never have, no matter what we perform for those around us.

I am troubled by the word “problematic,” mostly because of how fundamentally undescriptive it is. Tell me that something is xenophobic, condescending, clichéd, unspeakably stupid, or some other constellation of descriptors. Then I will decide whether I agree, based on the intersection of that thing with my particular set of values and aesthetics. But by saying it is problematic you are saying that it constitutes or presents a problem, to which my first instinct is to reply: I hope so.

Art is the realm of the problem. Art chews on problems, turns them over, examines them, breaks them open, breaks us open against them. Art contains a myriad of problems, dislocations, uncertainties. Doesn’t it? If not, then what?

Jen Silverman on the new moralisers

• “The website is colorful and anarchic, evoking the chaotic sensory experience of exploring a crammed, dusty shop.” Geeta Dayal explores the Syrian Cassette Archives.

• New music: The Last One, 1970 by Les Rallizes Dénudés; Untitled 3 by Final; Blinking In Time (full version) by Scanner.

• Why was erotic art so popular in ancient Pompeii? Meilan Solly investigates.

• You’ve been reframed: Anne Billson explores the history of split-screen cinema.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese era names illustrated as logos.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 745 by Wilted Woman.

• Fun type

• Split, Pt. 4 (1971) by The Groundhogs | Split Second Feeling (1981) by Cabaret Voltaire | Splitting The Atom (2010) by Massive Attack