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Magick weapon: Tom Gunning on Kenneth Anger
ArtForum, March, 2007 by Tom Gunning
THE FILMS OF KENNETH ANGER occupy the dark heart of American cinema. Along with Maya Deren (who slightly preceded him) and Stan Brakhage (who began making films roughly a decade after Anger), the director of Lucifer Rising (1972) remains the best known and most influential of the founding figures of American avant-garde film. But whereas Deren and Brakhage envisioned a homegrown avant-garde cinema that would scorn the Hollywood behemoth, Anger emerged from the dragon's lair itself. While his films--especially the five early works collected on Fantoma's glorious new DVD release The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume One--defied Hollywood practice and themes, they also drove right into the shimmering, illuminated moving images that undergird the Dream Factory. Anger's films exploit Hollywood's elaborate costumes, fantasies (both violent and erotic), otherworldly sets, and the peculiar mixture of magic and vulgarity that Anger himself dubbed "Hollywood Babylon." His detournement of Hollywood tropes helped Pop art emerge from the biting irony entwined with affection that defined American homosexual camp culture.
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Always a step ahead of cultural currents, Anger has long possessed an aesthetic clairvoyance, or perhaps simply a pervasive subterranean influence. With more justice than understanding, he has been proclaimed the inventor of the rock video. In the 1960s, Scorpio Rising (1963) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)--works destined for the second and final volume of The Films of Kenneth Anger, whose summer release will also bring to hand Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Rabbit's Moon (1979 version), and Lucifer Rising--blended rock sound tracks with razor-sharp editing and explosive visual images in a manner that still influences the most ambitious music videos. But the dialectical complexity of Anger's use of pop culture also deconstructed the MTV genre before it even emerged. In his alembic of cinema, Anger transmuted the lyrics and rhythms of pop tunes into visions as exhilarating as they are disturbing, taking seriously the claim that rock 'n' roll might literally be black magic. Anger does it all, bending the essential stuff of cinema--color, rhythm, movement, sound, and oneiric images--into works that transport a viewer even while the filmmaker strips enthrallment and enchantment of any alibi of innocence.
Although Fantoma's first disc lacks Anger's masterpiece, Scorpio Rising, this collection of his earliest work is nonetheless invaluable for its illumination of the unique qualities of his oeuvre. His first surviving film, Fireworks (1947), shot with the primitive intimacy of a teenage wet dream, delivers a raw dose of sexuality and desire that has rarely been equaled by other filmmakers. His exploration of the aesthetics of liquid flows and nighttime labyrinths, Eaux d'artifice (1953), offers one of Anger's most perfect, elegant, and wickedly deceptive films. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) captures an orgy of intoxication and narcissism at a Hollywood Halloween party on the verge of the Beat era, with hallucinatory imagery so witty that it almost justifies the vulgarity of the psychedelic culture that came in its wake. This disc--which also includes Puce Moment (1949) and Rabbit's Moon (shot in 1950 but edited and released in 1971)--delivers great works of American cinema and avant-garde art that are simultaneously deeply challenging and completely sensually satisfying: eye-popping and mind-expanding in the most complex sense. Unlike earlier VHS offerings of Anger's work, this DVD is based on meticulous restorations of often delicate material, and the versions of the films presented here have been carefully selected from the variety of editions Anger has released with different sound tracks and editing patterns. I am of two minds about digitally removing splices and marks of wear from prints, since it can create a falsely smooth surface, but I don't claim this to be a major problem. Anger's voice-over commentary provides many wonderful insights but resists, for the most part, a full-scale reading of the films' imagery, while his occasional forays into gossipy background information add spice.
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Anger and his films come wrapped in legends. He not only picked through classical and romantic mythology for material, but created a modern mythology from the detritus of popular culture. Separating truth from fable in the filmmaker's biography seems difficult, but, more important, pointless. Anger grew up in a realm of illusions, on the fringe of Hollywood in the studio era, and frequently refers to his grandmother, who designed costumes and sets for the stars. He claims he played the Changeling Prince in the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream shot by renowned German theater director Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle on a shimmering soundstage that recalls the forest in Anger's own Rabbit's Moon. I have no reason to doubt the claim, but I would find it equally fascinating if Anger was projecting his childhood identity onto a figure he saw on the screen. After all, Anger moves among a forest of symbols within a constructed fairyland. Like the gossip culture that his well-known underground classic book Hollywood Babylon (1959) chronicled, he continually peered beneath the surface of the illusion, discovering hidden desires that redefined the glimmer on the surface. Born in 1927, he came of age within a gay culture that refashioned the dreams Hollywood supplied en masse into subversive rituals of identity and cultural appropriation, reworking Hollywood's use of costuming, makeup, role playing, and created environments. For Anger, an artist's first creation must be his persona; "Anger" is, in fact, an adopted name. But this simulated paradise confronted a violent world where the forces of law and order were willing to unleash a cruel sadism to enforce conformity and to oppress sexual and ethnic difference (in Anger's voice-over to Fireworks, he reveals that the film's images of homophobic violence were partly inspired by the anti-Mexican zoot-suit riots in World War II-era LA, and as a teenager he personally experienced police brutality directed at gays).
