TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Short Film, Avant-garde/Experimental, Surrealist Film, Gay & Lesbian Films, Horror, Biker Film
Key Collaborators: Bobby Beausoleil (Leading Actor)

"Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland's two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2; the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975… Although he made films as a boy, Anger's earliest surviving work is 1947's Fireworks. This appeared three years before Jean Genet's groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D'Amour… Astonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art." - Simon Hattenstone (The Guardian, 2010)

"Although his entire filmography only adds up to about three hours of screen time, Kenneth Anger has exerted a powerful influence on filmmakers as diverse as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Derek Jarman and Roger Corman. Isaac Julien credited Anger's movies with "developing the vocabulary for the New Queer Cinema", and Anger arguably prescribed the grammar of MTV with the proto-music video elements of Scorpio Rising (1963), a pop-scored fever dream of biker boys and their toys. An oneiric haze of Dionysian hallucination or baroque nightmare suffuses all of Anger's movies." - Jessica Winter (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"To describe Kenneth Anger as a “cult filmmaker” seems requisite but incomplete. The 87-year-old native Angeleno is indeed the writer and director of the surrealist shorts Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), and Lucifer Rising (1970-81)—some of the wildest and most profoundly influential experimental films of the last century. But his salacious narrative history of the industry, Hollywood Babylon, originally published in 1960, is also kitsch-famous, a kind of gossip gospel in the land of holy celebrity. His film and video works are in the permanent collections of various museums of modern art. And he is also the most famous living practitioner of Thelema—the ritual-based doctrine dictated to Aleister Crowley by the spiritual messenger Aiwass." - Harmony Korine (Interview Magazine, 2014)

"With Maya Deren, the most important name in the development of the New American Cinema. Fascinated by magic, myth, and ritual, he began film-making at an early age and made his first significant contribution with Fireworks (47), a brilliant portrait of homosexuality. After several evocative works in Europe, he created the obsessive Scorpio Rising (63), a societal poem." - Georges Sadoul (Dictionary of Film Makers, 1972)

"The outer fringes of cinema, home to the avant-gardists and experimentalists, can be a daunting place. No plot? No dialogue?!! Even the words alone – avant-garde, experimental – can conjure the image of beard-stroking cinephiles gawping at split-screen installations. Yet the work of Kenneth Anger – the intrepid underground filmmaker who’s rubbed shoulders with everyone from Mick Jagger and Jean Cocteau to sexologist Alfred Kinsey and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey – soon dispels the stereotype. His work grabs you by the throat – with confrontational flashes of swastikas and skulls, and gay orgies lighting up the screen. He blends the iconography of evil with references to pop culture and male sexuality. To watch these movies is to feel as though you’ve stumbled upon the secret recordings of an underground cult. They’re daring, dangerous, and you can’t tear your eyes away from them." - Oliver Lunn (BFI, 2018)