Kenneth Anger, a Hollywood prodigy who went on to become one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation and whose influence is still felt in popular visual culture, from movies to music videos, died May 11. A town in Yucca Valley, California, adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. he was 96 years old.
His death at the assisted living center was confirmed Wednesday by Spencer Gresby, a spokesman for the gallery Spruce Majors, who has represented Anger since 2009. He said the announcement of his death was delayed because of issues with Anger. Property was well organized.
Anger personified the love-hate relationship between underground art and popular culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers have borrowed from popular iconography so generously or so subversively. And with his sensual, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, perhaps no one has seen their work so easily absorbed into the mainstream.
Anger’s most famous film,Scorpio Rising” (1963), a wall-to-wall fetish take on a Brooklyn biker gang pop hit soundtrack Sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles, Little Peggy March, and more, the song demonstrates how sounds and images can be combined to create something more powerful than the sum of its parts. Proved. It is widely considered to be the forerunner of music videos, and its influence can be felt in films as diverse as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and David He Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” (The Bobby Vinton hit that gave the title to the Lynch movie is also heard in “Scorpio Rising.”)
Anger, who was hailed as the founder of remix culture in his later years, was proud to be an outsider who didn’t belong to any particular movement. When asked about his position as the godfather of queer cinema in 2004, he replied, “I don’t like being put in a cubicle.”
He felt comfortable with celebrities. Some of his acquaintances include poet and artist Jean Cocteau, playwright Tennessee Williams, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, writer Anais Nin, and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, who have worked with him. Some people did.
But he also scandalized celebrities with his comedic tell-all, Hollywood Babylon. The book, filled with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino (Mr. Anger’s grandmother was the wardrobe mistress of silent films), was first published in France in 1959. It was published and widely pirated before being officially published in the United States. 1975.
Mr. Anger’s reputation as a filmmaker relied on relatively small things. body of work: Nine short, wordless films totaling less than three hours, made between 1947 and 1972, became known as the Magic Lantern Cycle. Some of them were fragments of feature films that were never completed due to lack of funds, such as Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965). Anger often abandoned and restarted projects, sometimes revising his films and showing slightly modified versions.
He was interested in the interplay of ancient mythology and pop culture. Several of his films, such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), which depicts a party with guests dressed as pagan gods, use sound and editing to simultaneously depict and perform rituals. He creates magical works in a trance state. Anger likened making the film to casting a spell.
Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer was born on February 3, 1927 in Santa Monica, California to Wilbur Anglemeyer and Lillian (Koehler) Anglemeyer. His father was an electrician for Douglas Aircraft. Many of the details of his biography he told, as well as the scandalous story of Hollywood Babylon, are difficult to corroborate. (He claimed to have played the role of a young prince in the 1935 film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the film’s star, Mickey Rooney, said the role was played by a girl.) He said he started working on it. child.
Anger’s oldest surviving film, “firework” (1947), made when he was 20, is a landmark in cinema both in form and content. It’s a dreamy psychodrama and an autobiographical coming-out film shot at his parents’ house while he was away for a funeral. In this work, Mr. Anger appears as a young man having a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of brawny sailors, one of whom removes his trousers to reveal a Roman candle.
Anger said guests at the film’s first screening included Alfred Kinsey, who bought a print of “Fireworks” for his collection, and James Whale, the director best known for “Frankenstein.” It is said that In 1950, encouraged by Jean Cocteau’s letter of praise for “Fireworks”, Mr. Angers moved to Paris, where he spent most of the next decade working as an assistant to Henri Langlois, director of the Cinemathèque Française. I was.
Anger completed one film during his stay in Europe. It is Eaux d’Artifice (1953), shot in the fountain garden of the Villa Este in Tivoli, Italy. Films for another production, Rabbit’s Moon, featuring characters from the Commedia dell’arte theater tradition, were kept in the Cinematheque Française vault for 20 years. This film was released in his two versions in the 1970s.
He filmed “The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” while visiting Los Angeles. Funding was difficult, so he supported himself by writing “Hollywood Babylon.”
Upon returning to the United States in the 1960s, Anger entered a productive phase that resulted in some of his most admired work. In one of his most famous experimental films of all time, Scorpio Rising, leather-clad bikers tend to his motorcycles, fuel his raucous Halloween parties, and desecrate his church. I’m here. Anger included provocative permutations, including Nazi imagery and excerpts from films depicting the life of Jesus.
The manager of the Los Angeles theater that screened “Scorpio Rising,” which included frontal nudity, was arrested on obscenity charges, and an obscenity case against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in Anger’s favor.
As the counterculture movement reached its peak in the mid-1960s, Anger moved to San Francisco. There, his associates included Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and musician Bobby Beausoleil, who became a member of the so-called Manson. family.
Anger spent much of this time developing and filming a project called “Lucifer Rising,” envisioning Lucifer as a god of light rather than a demon and, in Anger’s words, “the patron saint of cinema.” rice field. A disciple of occultist Aleister Crowley, Mr. Anger called the film “a force of evil.” He had a tattoo of the name Lucifer on his chest.
Much of the original footage for “Lucifer Rising” is said to have been lost, and Anger accused Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it. Some salvaged material, however, features a synthesizer score by Mick Jagger, used in the hilarious “A Prayer to the Devil’s Brother” (1969).
Completed in 1972 and revised several times, Lucifer Rising focuses on rebirth, in contrast to the previous decade’s obsession with Anger’s death. Beausoleil was serving a life sentence for murder, but he wrote the song from prison.
The film marked the end of the magic lantern cycle, after which Anger retired from filmmaking almost entirely for about 20 years. He published his 1984 ‘Hollywood His Babylon II’. This period coincided with the rise of his videos in music and the rise of rapid-fire editing in mainstream film, but was otherwise a relatively inactive period for Mr. Anger. His influence on both is recognized.
Many would agree that his pseudonym was well chosen. Mr. Anger’s instability is the product of many anecdotes. Friendships and partnerships, as in the case of Beausoleil and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was originally hired to produce the music for “Lucifer Rising,” have led to Mr. Anger threatening to put a curse on the perpetrators. was known to end with
Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, making a string of short films, including “Mouse Heaven” (2004), about his worship of Mickey Mouse. “Elliott Suicide” (2007), an ode to singer Elliott Smith. and “Itch Will!” (2008), a short film collection of archive footage of the Hitler Youth movement. Critical reaction to the new work was generally lukewarm, and the focus remained on his earlier films. Magic His lantern work has been published on a restored version of his DVD and has been installed in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.
Mr. Anger had no direct survivors. I lived in Los Angeles before moving to a nursing home.
Martin Scorsese, in an essay for the 2007 DVD release, praised Anger’s film for its poetic rhythm and what he called “inevitable” logic.
Scorsese wrote, “The structure, form, and feel of these films seem less invented than received from sources hidden from us.”
Alex Traub Contributed to the report.
