Kenneth Anger: Tinseltown’s outrageous magus of occult desire | Film

Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.

But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre maudit to go with the films maudits. Anger’s genius was to present his delirious work, with all its horrendous squalor and grainy black-and-white tabloid-style photos, and whose content he later claimed to have intuited through telepathy, as a nonfictional history of scandals about legendary stars, the sort of thing withheld by the Hollywood PR machine which everyone knew had long been ruthlessly suppressing scandal and creating bowdlerised biographical accounts of actors and actresses rolling off the star machine production line.

With a straight face, Anger presented what was effectively a satanic version of a theologian’s Lives of the Saints: all the horribly juicy gossip about Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Mary Astor, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe and many more, with all the abortions, drug addictions and sexual indulgences. This book was the foundation stone of the gossip industry, a subversive, black-comic slapstick sketch in Anger’s very own theatre of cruelty, taking aim at the solemn way the movie industry demanded its audience believe in that piety of supposed family values which had been imposed on the business after the Hays Code was brought in in the wake of the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal.

Actually, Anger’s book should be seen as a brilliant satirical fiction, a séance of horror, communing with the spirits of unhappiness and excess floating unacknowledged around Los Angeles. Alternatively it is a kind of reference book slash pulp novel which does in fact have something to say about the toll being taken on the ordinary human beings chewed up and spat out by Hollywood. Hollywood Babylon was the nightmare behind the Hollywood dream – and later bestselling Hollywood memoirs such as David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon indicated that Anger’s anthology of rumour was not totally detached from reality.

Anger’s films addressed the same occult pleasures and desires. The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is disturbing, erotic and ritualistic, freely inspired by Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Scorpio Rising (1963) was a gay leather biker-fetish fever dream. His countercultural freakout Lucifer Rising (1972) had a Crowleyesque theme, and the involvement of Bobby Beausoleil – currently serving a life sentence as a result of his membership of the Manson family – added to its notoriety. An earlier film, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), a bizarre vision of dope-smoking funeral attenders, starred Mick Jagger, who played the music. Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) had featured the song Dream Lover under shots of handsome young men erotically polishing a hot rod. These were images that inspired David Lynch and JG Ballard, and a thousand covertly homoerotic TV ads for blue jeans.

Anger was the id in the American pop cultural mind: the Antonin Artaud of the underground cinema.

Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.

But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre maudit to go with the films maudits. Anger’s genius was to present his delirious work, with all its horrendous squalor and grainy black-and-white tabloid-style photos, and whose content he later claimed to have intuited through telepathy, as a nonfictional history of scandals about legendary stars, the sort of thing withheld by the Hollywood PR machine which everyone knew had long been ruthlessly suppressing scandal and creating bowdlerised biographical accounts of actors and actresses rolling off the star machine production line.

With a straight face, Anger presented what was effectively a satanic version of a theologian’s Lives of the Saints: all the horribly juicy gossip about Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Mary Astor, Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe and many more, with all the abortions, drug addictions and sexual indulgences. This book was the foundation stone of the gossip industry, a subversive, black-comic slapstick sketch in Anger’s very own theatre of cruelty, taking aim at the solemn way the movie industry demanded its audience believe in that piety of supposed family values which had been imposed on the business after the Hays Code was brought in in the wake of the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal.

Actually, Anger’s book should be seen as a brilliant satirical fiction, a séance of horror, communing with the spirits of unhappiness and excess floating unacknowledged around Los Angeles. Alternatively it is a kind of reference book slash pulp novel which does in fact have something to say about the toll being taken on the ordinary human beings chewed up and spat out by Hollywood. Hollywood Babylon was the nightmare behind the Hollywood dream – and later bestselling Hollywood memoirs such as David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon indicated that Anger’s anthology of rumour was not totally detached from reality.

Anger’s films addressed the same occult pleasures and desires. The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is disturbing, erotic and ritualistic, freely inspired by Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Scorpio Rising (1963) was a gay leather biker-fetish fever dream. His countercultural freakout Lucifer Rising (1972) had a Crowleyesque theme, and the involvement of Bobby Beausoleil – currently serving a life sentence as a result of his membership of the Manson family – added to its notoriety. An earlier film, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), a bizarre vision of dope-smoking funeral attenders, starred Mick Jagger, who played the music. Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) had featured the song Dream Lover under shots of handsome young men erotically polishing a hot rod. These were images that inspired David Lynch and JG Ballard, and a thousand covertly homoerotic TV ads for blue jeans.

Anger was the id in the American pop cultural mind: the Antonin Artaud of the underground cinema.