Anger does not moralize or stress or take stands: He only presents the theme, as a poet, fully and roundly, so that after Anger there is nothing to say on the subject, everything is in his movie, hinted, suggested, much more than what we see in it after the first or second viewing.
– Jonas Mekas
It is the end of an era. Kenneth Anger has died. We have lost two giants of the cinema this year when Jean-Luc Godard died several months ago and now Kenneth Anger. There is really no way to quantify the influence and importance of either of these filmmakers. They were both avant-garde modernists who changed the aesthetic landscape of cinema with their early films only to move so far beyond the rest of the cinematic world that their films became almost alien in their form. But the similarities end there.
Anger’s films sought to explore the tenuous subjective connections between the images of our culture. Anger saw a link between the hedonistic glamour of old Hollywood films and the iconography of satanism and demonology. Anger’s films are spiritual in that his films convey the feelings of these paradoxical connections between images. One can see Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon as the literary representation of the same impulse responsible for his Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) and Puce Moment (1949).
When Anger applied sound to his images it was almost always a jukebox soundtrack designed to give a voice to the inherently queer subtext of his montage. Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970) and Scorpio Rising (1963) are the best examples of this. From the moment that Anger premiered Scorpio Rising the cinema had to re-think how it used pop songs in movies. Martin Scorsese pioneered taking the confessional aspect of the pop song in Anger’s films and turning it into the aesthetic counterpoint of a scene. The rape scene in Scorpio Rising led directly to the pool hall brawl in Mean Streets (1973).
When Anger commissioned original music it came from the pop rock world of Jimmy Page that tied the virtuosity of the guitar solo to the glamour of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. Lucifer Rising (1972) contained all of the excess of the seventies dressed up like Cobra Woman (1944) in a celebration of spiritual fulfillment and actuality. Lucifer Rising, like Scorpio Rising, envisions the very process of montage as narrative form wherein meanings build gradually like character arcs that ultimately reveal the primal nature of the signifiers themselves. Where Sergei Eisenstein found himself saddled with a plot around which to hang his montages, Anger simply allowed montage to exist as thematic narrative.
Anger’s poetic approach to cinema became the queer form of the sixties as it was adopted by Jack Smith and Ron Rice. But Anger’s work is not so much concerned with that concrete idea of sexuality. His films link Busby Berkley musicals to the work of Maya Deren and finds in those connections a pure cinematic form that is at once abstract and intellectual in its self-contained intertextual discourse as it is a spectacle of escapism where the sheer beauty of the images moves the viewer emotionally.
Kenneth Anger’s life was a sordid, controversial and muddy affair to be sure. Yet, his creative output is so singular and powerful that it simply cannot be denied. Since Fireworks (1947) the austere artistry of Jean Cocteau has been colliding over and over with the plastic culture of pop. There’s a certain rawness to even Anger’s most polished films that begs a comparison with figures like Jean Genet and Pier Paolo Passolini. The difference between Kenneth Anger and these other masters is that everyone of Anger’s films is somehow essential.
Anger’s work may have first entered the mainstream in the fifties and sixties but he has remained, up until his death, isolated. Whenever a new film by Anger was screened it was an extension of the last but in a direction so unfathomable that it would take pop culture at least another few years to catch up. The cliche that some art is “too beautiful for this world” is absurd, but if it were ever to be true then it would be regarding the films of Kenneth Anger. Anger’s films were not of our world because they took the viewer to a place outside of time and imagination where sound and image exist in a perfect chaotic harmony.
