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| First Film | Fireworks | Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome | Autobiodata |
| Sitney | Rowe | Essential Cinema | Top Menu |
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Kenneth Anger was born in 1930 in Southern California in the land of Hollywood.. Intoxicated by the air of "tinsel town" admixed with a passion for the occult, Anger's films deal with ritual magick themes. Since he grew up near the center of American movie production (the dream factories) it is not entirely surprising that by the age of eleven he was making films. Anger, child of Hollywood, and so familiar with dream reality, makes films that support the preeminence of imagination. And in his films, the "dream" is the metaphor used for human imagination. P. Adams Sitney, one of the most articulate observers of experimental film in general and the New American Cinema in particular writes in his history of the movement, Visionary Film, that "the recurrent theme of the American avant-garde film is the triumph of the imagination. Nowhere is this clearer than in the films of Anger."
First FilmWho Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941)7 minutes.16mm. Black & White. Silent. Filmed in Santa Monica, California
A montage of American children at play, drifting, dreaming, in the last summer before Pearl Harbor. Flash cuts of newsreel holocaust dart across their reverie. Fog invades the playground; the children dropping in mock death to make a misty landscape of dreamers.
Fireworks (1947)15 minutes16mm. Black & White Soundtrack by Respighi Filmed in Hollywood.
A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before.
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-1966)38 minutes16mm. Color (Ektachrome 7387) Soundtrack: Janacek, Glagolithic Mass Filmed at Samson DeBrier's home in Hollywood, "and another place." In 1954, after four years in France, Anger returned to California and made the film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. The title of the film comes from the poem "Kublai Khan" by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge claimed that the poem came to him during an opium dream. The poem tells the story of the Mongol general and statesman who built a pleasure dome. The film. subtitled "Lord Shiva's Dream" is a complex meditation of ideas that Anger absorbed from his interest in the occultist Aleister Crowley.
P. Adams Sitneyfrom Visionary FilmIn Anger's films his image of himself, of the self, is as a Magus, never as a film-maker. He continues the tradition of Jean Cocteau, a film-maker dear to him, who in Le Sang d'un Poete first made the aesthetic quest legitimate as a subject for cinema...Anger and other American avant-garde film-makers took from Cocteau both his fascination with the traditional means of art-- poetry, music, sculpture-- as opposed to cinema itself and his fusion of the aesthetic and the erotic quests...For Anger the aesthetic endeavor is a category of magick. [pages 133-134]
Carel Rowefrom "Illuminating Lucifer" in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and CriticismAnger, a romanticist, sees occultism as a source of hermetic knowledge. For Anger, "Making a movie is casting a spell." He claims "Magick" as his lifework and "the cinematograph" for his "Magick weapon." He dubs the collection of his works "The Magick Lantern Cycle," has adopted Aleister Crowley as his guru, sees his films to be "a search for light and enlightenment...As a prestidigitator Anger somewhat parallels Melies: a magician making transformations as well as reconstructions of reality...As a visionary Anger creates his own frame of reference which is an extension of the vision and teachings of Aleister Crowley. [pages 111-112]Essential CinemaWhen Anthology Film Archives first opened on December 1, 1970 it was described by its founders as the "first film museum exclusively devoted to the film as an art. "The art of cinema surfaces primarily when it divests itself of commercial norms." A group of five individuals who "[did] not represent a single school of taste or thought" selected those films which best represent film as an art form. The Film Selection Committee included: James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney.The following eight works by Anger were selected as "essential works of the art of cinema" by the Film Selection Committee:
AutobiodataAnger provided the following autobiographical details in a booklet that accompanied a showing of his work at the Film-Makers Cinematheque in New York, 1966:Sun Sign: Aquarian |
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1999 Bolex Poetics- Official Team Roster URL: http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/99bpr.html Published: December 7, 1998 Updated: May 12, 2000 Copyright © 1998-1999 by the Cosmic Baseball Association email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com 725* |
