Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger was an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor, and writer. Working exclusively in short films, he produced almost 40 works beginning in 1937, nine of which have been grouped together as the "Magick Lantern Cycle". Anger's films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing "elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle". He has been called "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers", with several films released before homosexuality was legalized in the U.S. Anger also explored occult themes in many of his films; he was fascinated by the English occultist Aleister Crowley and an adherent of Thelema, the religion Crowley founded.
Anger was born into a middle-class Presbyterian family in Santa Monica, California. He began making short films when he was 14 years old, although his first film to gain any recognition was the homoerotic Fireworks. The work's controversial nature led to his trial on obscenity charges, but he was acquitted. A friendship and working relationship subsequently began with pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Moving to Europe, Anger produced a number of shorts inspired by the avant-garde scene there, such as Eaux d'Artifice and Rabbit's Moon.
Returning to the U.S. in the early 1950s, Anger began work on several new projects, including the films Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandos, and the gossip book Hollywood Babylon. The latter became infamous for various dubious and sensationalist claims, many of which were disproved, though some remain urban legends. Getting to know several notable countercultural figures of the time, Anger involved them in his subsequent Thelema-themed works, Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising. After failing to produce a sequel to Lucifer Rising, which he attempted through the mid-1980s, Anger retired from filmmaking, instead focusing on Hollywood Babylon II. In the 2000s he returned to filmmaking, producing shorts for various film festivals and events.
Anger described filmmakers such as Auguste and Louis Lumière, Georges Méliès, and Maya Deren as influences, and has been cited as an important influence on directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and John Waters. Kinsey Today argued that Anger had "a profound impact on the work of many other filmmakers and artists, as well as on music video as an emergent art form using dream sequence, dance, fantasy, and narrative." The distinctive aesthetics of music videos, defined by a new visual vocabulary, reflect Kenneth Anger’s use of surreal and occult imagery, as well as his focus on mood, primary colors, symbolism, and unconventional narrative forms.
Biography
1927–1936: Early life
Kenneth Anger was born as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer on February 3, 1927, in Santa Monica, California. His family was Presbyterian, but he became more interested in the occult. His father, Wilbur Anglemyer, was of German ancestry and was born in Troy, Ohio, while his disabled mother, Lillian Coler, had English ancestry. Anger's parents met at Ohio State University and after marrying had their first child, Jean Anglemyer, in 1918, followed by a second, Robert "Bob" Anglemyer, in 1921. That year they moved to Santa Monica to be near Lillian's mother, Bertha Coler, who had recently moved there. There Wilbur got a job as an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft, earning enough money that they could live comfortably as a middle-class family.Kenneth Anger, their third and final child, was born in 1927. Growing up, he did not get along with his parents or siblings. His brother Bob later claimed that as the youngest child, Kenneth had been spoiled by his mother and grandmother and became somewhat "bratty". His grandmother Bertha was a strong influence on the young Kenneth and supported the family financially during the Great Depression. It was she who first took Kenneth to the cinema, to see a double bill of The Singing Fool and Thunder Over Mexico. Bertha encouraged his artistic interests and later moved into a house in Hollywood with another woman, Miss Diggy, who also encouraged Kenneth. He developed an early interest in film and enjoyed reading the movie tie-in Big Little books. Kenneth later said, "I was a child prodigy who never got smarter." He remembered attending the Santa Monica Cotillion, where he met Shirley Temple, with whom he once danced.
Anger claimed in Hollywood Babylon II that he played the Changeling Prince in the 1935 Warner Brothers film A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the character was played by a girl named Sheila Brown. Anger's unofficial biographer, Bill Landis, remarked in 1995 that the Changeling Prince was definitely "Anger as a child; visually, he's immediately recognizable".
1937–1946: First films
Anger's first film was created in 1937, when he was ten years old. The short, Ferdinand the Bull, was shot on the remains of 16 mm film that had been left unused after the Anglemyers had made home movies with it on a family vacation to Yosemite National Park. In Ferdinand the Bull, which has never been made publicly available, Kenneth dressed as a matador, wearing a cape, while two of his friends from the Boy Scouts played the bull. His second work, created when he was 14, was Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat, which Anger has often called his first proper film. It was made from footage of children playing during the summer, accompanied with popular songs by bands including the Ink Spots. The next year, he produced another amateur film, Prisoner of Mars, which was heavily influenced by Flash Gordon. In this science fiction-inspired feature, in which he played the protagonist, Anger added elements taken from the Greek mythological myth of the Minotaur and constructed a small volcano in his back yard as a homemade special effect. Many of these early films are considered lost, with Anger burning much of his previous work in 1967.In 1944, the Anglemyers moved to Hollywood to move in with family, and Kenneth began attending Beverly Hills High School. It was here that he met Marilyn Granas, who had once been the stand-in for Shirley Temple, and he asked her – alongside another classmate and an older woman – to appear in his next film project, which was ultimately titled Escape Episode. Revolving partially around the occult, the picture was filmed in a "spooky old castle" in Hollywood and was subsequently screened at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. Around this time, Anger also began attending screenings of silent films at Clara Grossman's art gallery, through which he met a fellow filmmaker, Curtis Harrington, with whom he formed Creative Film Associates. Harrington is said to have introduced Anger to the work of English occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley's philosophy of Thelema exerted a profound influence on Anger's career. CFA was founded to distribute experimental or "underground" films, such as those of Maya Deren and John and James Whitney, as well as Anger's and Harrington's.
Anger's interest in the occult deepened in high school. He first indirectly encountered the subject through reading L. Frank Baum's Oz books as a child, with their accompanying Rosicrucian philosophies. He was also interested in the works of the French ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi, as well as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, although his favorite writings were Crowley's; he eventually converted to Thelema, the religion Crowley founded.
1947–1949: ''Fireworks'' and early career
Anger discovered his homosexuality at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in the United States, and he began associating with the underground gay scene. At some point in the mid-1940s, he was arrested by police in a "homosexual entrapment", after which he decided to move out of his parents' home, gaining his own apartment largely financed by his grandmother, and abandoning the name Anglemyer in favor of Anger. He started attending the University of Southern California, where he studied cinema, and also began experimenting with the use of mind-altering drugs like cannabis and peyote. It was then that he decided to produce a film that would deal with his sexuality, just as other gay avant-garde filmmakers like Willard Maas were doing in that decade. The result was the short film Fireworks, which was created in 1947 and exhibited publicly in 1948.Upon Fireworks
One of the first people to buy a copy of Fireworks was the sexologist Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research. He and Anger struck up a friendship that lasted until Kinsey's death, during which time Anger aided Kinsey in his research. According to Anger's unofficial biographer Bill Landis, Kinsey became a "father figure" whom Anger "could both interact with and emulate." In 1949, Anger began work on the film Puce Women, which unlike Fireworks was filmed in color. It starred Yvonne Marquis as a glamorous woman going about her daily life; Anger later said: "Puce Women was my love affair with Hollywood... with all the great goddesses of the silent screen. They were to be filmed in their homes; I was, in effect, filming ghosts." Due to lack of funding, only one scene was ever produced, eventually released under the title Puce Moment. That same year, Anger directed The Love That Whirls, a film based on Aztec human sacrifice; because of the nudity it contained, it was destroyed by technicians at the film lab who deemed it obscene.