Kenneth Anger - the Conscience of Hollywood
The cult director turns
myths into reality
Kenneth has travelled sixteen hours from sunny Palm Springs, California, to snow white Tampere. Despite the long journey there is no sight of tiredness on his face. The text on his pillarbox red sweatshirt confidently reads ANGER. "I often dress in red, red brings life about."
Cinema is my first love
Kenneth Anger has never used dialogue in his films. Anger likes music but films are his true love. He calls his style "visual music". "I don't have anything against dialogue", he smiles, "but when you're filming alone with a home video camera you better make a silent film." The Nastic Mass, a film Anger is working on now will be his first one where a character actually has some lines.
Pandora's box
Anger's career began in the age of four, when he was chosen to play the changeling prince in Max Reinhardt's adaptation of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream for the screen. Even though Kenneth Anger has sniffed the Hollywood air, luckily enough he never inhaled. He moved to Europe once he had been banned in the dream factory for his indecent films. "Begging for money is like prostitution", Anger says vehemently. He would not object to money though: "It would be great to have a million dollar budget but I do not want to be part of that industry."
Despite all, Hollywood's still got that something. The glamour, glitter and gossip behind the scenes fascinate Anger. That's partly the reason why he knows more than one superstar: Henry Miller, Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Mick Jagger, Anais Nin... Anger's bestseller s did provoke reactions with its exposures in the 60s and 70s. "Hollywood is a quite a Pandora's box", Anger says convincingly. A new book with hot gossip is on its way.
Magical godfather of music videos
Anger has had a great impact on other filmmakers, he's been much more on the influence-giving than on the taking side. David Lynch's Blue Velvet is stigmatized by angerian weirdness. The exotic lighting and gay iconography in Fassbinder's Querrell has often been compared to Anger's work. Today's advertisement and music video culture is closely related to Anger's short films. Anger himself doesn't think much of his role as a forerunner. "Music video makers have stolen their ideas directly from me. Martin Scorsese is the only person who has done it in a pleasant way". Once Anger was asked to make a music video for a band, but he wasn't interested. "The music was neo-retro-something... it wouldn't have worked."
Probably the strongest influential person in Anger's history is a magician and an occultist Alesteir Crowley. Anger's film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is about a crowleyan rite, in which a circle of witches turn themselves into pagan gods and goddesses. J.W. Parsons, who belonged to Anger's circle of friends, needed a "scarlet" woman for his rites to give a birth to a hybrid called Babalon. In the ritual Parsons used his redhead girlfriend Marjorie Cameron. She couldn't get pregnant though, and four years later Parsons died in an unexplained explosion. To Anger, who is so into occultism, this incident is a true myth, and worth a film of course.
But that's the truth!
Anger wants his films to be real. "I've never asked my actors to pretend." Rock singer Marianne Faithful is a female demon Lilith in the film Lucifer Rising. "Marianne attempted suicide once, but she didn't really want it to happen. Only an amateur cuts her wrist for twenty minutes. Her sign is a Capricorn, and that's why she is self-destructive. That's her Lilith-side", smiles Anger ambiguously. "The characters in Scorpio Rising are real motor cyclists, and the characters in Invocation of My Demon Brother they are as bad in real life as in the film", Anger assures. Bobby Beausoleil was supposed to be in the leading role in Lucifer Rising, but chemistry between the actor and the director didn't quite work. A little later Beausoleil was sentenced to prison for life for his involvement in the Manson family mass murders. Nothing could be more satanic than that! Are Anger films also autobiographical? Perhaps. After all, he is an Aquarius and a Scorpio rising.
Translation: Piia Holopainen
and Pia Valtanen