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Kenneth Anger, the king of underground cinema who uncovered the miseries of ‘Hollywood Babylon’, dies

A visionary? A phony? A morbid professional? A magician? Kenneth Angel It was all of those things and a few more. Either through his movies, or his scandalous books, or his association with the darkest of the counterculture (of led zeppelin and the Rolling Stones to Charles Manson), The filmmaker and writer leaves an unclassifiable memory after his death at the age of 96.

Born in Santa Monica (California), into a family slightly related to the film industry, Anger began to cultivate his legend from a very young age. Throughout his life he claimed to have danced with the child star Shirley Temple and having played a small role in a version of The dream of a nigth of summer premiered in 1935. Statements that are, at least, debatable.

Kenneth Anger’s adolescence was marked by three factors: discovering his homosexuality (at that time illegal in the US), his fascination with the occult and an unconditional love for cinema that led him to make his first short film at the age of 14. All these elements came together Fireworks, film appeared in 1947 (when the filmmaker was 20 years old) that caused a tremendous scandal.

considered the first openly gay film released in the US, Firework he used resources from surrealism and symbolism to narrate the sexual encounter between an adolescent (Anger himself) and a group of sailors. Due to such audacity, the director faced an obscenity trial, but also drew the attention of artists such as Jean Cocteau and the influential sexologist Alfred Kinsey.

Advised by Cocteau, Anger moved to Paris in 1950, shooting films (Puce Women, Rabbit’s Moon) that paid homage to the aesthetics of silent cinema. Beset by economic difficulties, and always under the shadow of the occultist Aleister Crowley and his doctrines, the director filmed three years later Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, another mess full of esoteric imagery in which the writer participated Anaïs Nin and the painter Marjorie Cameron.

The ‘Hollywood Babylon’ scandal

That chronic shortage of funds was the raison d’être of Hollywood Babylon, the mythical book published by Anger (with the critic elliott stein as an uncredited contributor) in 1959. It is a volume full of gossip, the more sensationalist the better, about the stars of golden Hollywood and their intimacies.

In Hollywood Babylon, Anger gave birth to legends like the one according to which the silent movie star Clara Bow had held an orgy with an American football team whose members included the young man John Wayne. Or that other one that adjudicated the death of Ramón Novaro, another idol of the silent screen, to a beating inflicted with an autographed dildo by no less than Rudolph Valentine.

Although Kenneth Anger and his book drew the ire of ‘serious’ historians (not to mention many figures mentioned in his work, who considered frying him with lawsuits), the sales success was considerable. Hence a second volume of hollywood babylon appeared in 1984, and that Anger claimed to have completed a third book that would only be published after his death, in order to avoid (or so he claimed) reprisals from Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology.

‘Scorpio Rising’, the Stones and Charles Manson

After staying with the desire to adapt O’s Story, the founding novel of sadomasochistic eroticism, Anger returned to the United States and returned to her own accord with Scorpio Rising (1963). A short this one that highlighted, with a lot of irony and no subtlety, the homoerotic elements present in the very virile culture of motorcycle fans.

In addition to the usual obscenity lawsuits, Anger had to deal with threats from the American Nazi Party, outraged by the mocking use of swastikas and other such symbols. But while this problematic imagery was the most compelling feature of the film, the director’s use of a soundtrack filled with pop songs also proved highly influential.

Without going further, Scorpio Rising used the song Blue Velvet 23 years before David Lynch made it the axis of Blue velvet. As for the way in which the themes that sound in the film interact with the images, it left a mark on the memory of Martin Scorsese. Nicolas Winding Refn, for his part, took good note of the costumes of the characters (and the use of the scorpion as leitmotiv visual) for the clothing of ryan gosling in Drive.

The hallucinatory tone of Anger’s films had much in common with the more nightmarish side of nascent psychedelia. Something that was demonstrated in 1966, when the director settled in San Francisco and became friends with Bobby Beausoleil, young and handsome delinquent who would end up going down in history for his links to the ‘manson family’ and for the murder of the musician gary hinman in 1969.

Although Beausoleil and Anger would end up parting on bad terms, the former appeared in Invocation of my Demon Brother, short where they were also seen Anton LaVey, leader of the church of satan and a Mick jagger who also provided the film’s cacophonous soundtrack. Another guest star in the film was Jimmy Page, guitarist of led zeppelin, who not only worked with the filmmaker on Lucifer Rising (1972), but also called on his services as an exorcist.

Anger’s rock star buddy couldn’t last forever, which was proven when Jimmy Page’s wife kicked him out of their London home for freeriding. As a result of the anger, the director replaced the guitarist’s soundtrack to Lucifer Rising for another written by a Bobby Beausoleil who recorded it in prison. After this misstep, Anger hung up the camera on her between 1980 and 2000, returning in the latter year with the ironic anti-smoking short film Don’t Smoke That Cigarette.

Hailed as the patriarch of underground cinema, surrounded by the esteem of characters like Vincent Gallo and the subject of retrospectives at MOMA and other temples of modernity, Anger made a few more films during his later years. In addition, he was in charge of restoring and supervising the publication of his most legendary works.

His death leaves for posterity a string of films whose influence, albeit subterranean, has marked the evolution of cinema for more than half a century. And an enigma for posterity, in the form of the third volume of Hollywood Babylon: Will we ever get to read it, or will Tom Cruise end up being more powerful than Lucifer himself?

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