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For young video artists such as Doug Aitken, he can do no wrong. Kenneth Anger, American filmmaker, with Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren one of the three greats of American independent cinema, has been active for almost 60 years. He made films with leather queens before anyone knew what a leather queen was. Anger is considered the ultimate father of the video clip because he was the first to use pop music as a filmsoundtrack. Heinrich Deisl spoke with the 80-year-old filmdirector about his interest in music, the occult and contemporary political reality. A musical portrait on this great magician of light.Born in Santa Monica in 1927, Kenneth Anger is a colourful and controversial director, a great storyteller of the sort that you cannot immediately put your finger on. His films, famous and infamous, show his interest in old Egyptian mysticism and in the English occult personality, Aleister Crowley. More importantly, Anger was one of the first filmmakers to recognize the significance of pop songs for film. Interwoven and united with musical tracks, his montages are reminiscent of the work of the Russian filmdirector, Sergej Eisenstein, and depict mysterious, surrealistic landscapes from which emerge the voices of unattainable psychedelic visions. For countless directors, from Martin Scorsese and David Lynch to Quentin Tarantino, Anger is a model in his efforts to use pop music as a structured and narrative element in film. For Anger, music serves several purposes. It not only serves a supporting role, but anticipates the flow of images. Sometimes the songs contradict the images, or indeed provide them with an extra meaning. This extraordinary interplay of image and sound is particularly apparent in the Anger classic, Scorpio Rising, made in 1964. In the film, a documentary-like tale about a gay motorcycle gang dressed as Nazis, the lyrics from He’s a Rebel by the Crystals and Elvis Presley’s Devil in Disguise are the only spoken text, while the images of the protagonists are intermingled with scenes from Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). Anger: ‘I guess I was one of the first persons using a pop track in a film. Scorpio Rising is maybe the most prominent example. It was long before Scorsese’s Mean Streets.Then it entered into the Hollywood lexicon of possibilities that it was easier to pick up a pop tune and exploit it than having an original score written for a film. My films are reflections of the moments they are made. So when Scorpio Rising was done, a song like Presley’s Devil in Disguise was playing everywhere on the radio. It was something that I naturally took from maybe hundreds of songs. To use it, I had to pay for the royalties, which was about a third of the whole budget. You couldn’t steal the music the way they do today, with everybody stealing from anybody else. We live in the age of piracy.’

Love for the Silent Film

Anger’s images of bikers, wizards, sadomasochism and trance-like tableaux vivants would be unimaginable without Hollywood’s golden age of the prewar silent film. Anger has always been a great fan of the old Hollywood. During his student time, he set up a fan club for the actress Maria Montez. As a consequence to a jokey-thought proposal by Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard, he wrote the two-part bestseller Hollywood Babylon in 1959 and in 1984, about the glamour and the gossip of the old Hollywood, and he has one of the biggest collections of Rudolph Valentino memorabilia. He also stated in an interview that Audrey Hepburn was the last film actress who truly interested him. Anger was one of Hollywood’s first film artists who would explicitly use a homoreotic iconography in his films. Alfred Kinsley, of the Institute for Sex Research, was a good friend. Anger assisted him in building up his film archive, in which he is himself included in a masturbation scene. In the 1950s, he went to Paris, where he worked for Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française. Anger went to Paris on an invitation from Jean Cocteau, who had seen Anger’s first film, Fireworks (1947) at the Festival du film maudit in Biarritz, a film whose imaginations ans scenographies were quit close to Cocteau’s own surrealist cinematic visionsAnger’s work is more romantic than nihilistic. As is also true for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the conflict (the passion) between the human and the spiritual is crucial. For Anger, Lucifer is literally the bringer of light, whose problem was that he, as Anger describes it, ‘turned the stereo up too loud’. In Lucifer, Anger recognised the prototype of the outlaw, who would later grow into an icon of popular culture. For Anger, characters that break free from social consensus represent the promise of individual freedom. Seen in this context, the film, Rabbit’s Moon (1950), introduces an almost melancholic mixture of Pierrot and the harlequin. The film, of which there are three versions, tells of the Japanese myth of a rabbit on the moon, in a mixture of mime and kabuki theatre. It is the example that most springs to mind of Anger’s love for the primacy of the image in the silent film and a poetic exaggeration of the rebel. It was produced with the support of oil magnate and art maecenas J. Paul Getty. Anger later commented that ‘Getty loved Mickey Mouse the same I did.’

Rock Versus Electronics

Anger’s special mix of esoteric knowledge, film art and contemporary music not only referred to the status quo of the popular culture at the end of the 1960s, but also influenced the development of the music video, and is evident in videos by Paul Poet, David LaChapelle or Peter Christopherson. Anger was way in advance of these developments, but feels no need to see them himself. He refuses to have a television in his house.When Anger used the electronic music of Mick Jagger’s Moog synthesizer for Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), it united several important themes. The synthetic sounds played by Jagger himself formed a strong contrast to the culture of realism and authenticity in rock music, of which the Rolling Stones were the prime example. It furthermore picked up on the 1950s tradition of using synthesizer sounds to create a foreboding atmosphere in science fiction and horror films. The best-known example could be Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), whose cawing and screeching was the product of a forerunner of the Moog synthesizer. When Anger tells how Invocation came about, it becomes all the more apparent that legendary moments find their source in ‘being at the right place at the right time’. Anger: ‘Mick Jagger was one of the first private people to own a Moog synthesizer, which he had personally received from Robert Moog. When I had finished Invocation, Jagger offered me to show it at his home. While I would run the 16mm film projector, he improvised on it. The music was simultaneously recorded in stereo, but was later edited into the film in mono, given that 16mm films have no stereo sound. That was a shame, because the music had very emphatic stereo effects. The right and left speakers, as it were, talked to each other.Anger further explains, ‘I have always been interested in what was going on in the latest music. I take notes or buy records.’ For Lucifer Rising (1970) as well, a bizarre cinematic compilation and contemplation of all kinds of rituals and ceremonies filmed on location in Karnak (Egypt) and London, he again worked with a representative of the new music: Jimmie Page, the ingenious guitarist of the hard rock band Led Zeppelin. The collaboration ended in an argument because Anger felt that Page used too many drugs and worked too slowly. In the end, he decided to work with the controversial Bobby Beausoleil, a later member of the Manson family sentenced to life in prison for murder. Beausoleil wrote the sound track from prison, and it was later performed by the Beausoleil Freedom Orchestra. Anger is a true fan of swing and rock ‘n roll. How much of an influence has contemporary music on him? ‘I could only have avoided it if I had walked around with earplugs in my ears’, he mockingly replies, and, to add a critical touch, ‘There is one form of music that I hate: rap. It is a kind of ugliness that I find totally repellant. There is nothing in it for me, either intellectually nor in terms of discipline skill. I can’t do anything with it at all.’

Spiritualism and Fetishism

Anger has been a lifelong follower of Aleister Crowley and his spiritual teachings, but how references to the occult are specifically defined remains an open question. Anger is not very interested in what he calls ‘the profaning of the cult’ in the form of pentagrams and letter codes. ‘That’s just maquillage, a fashion. There will be no miracle or catastrophe if someone releases 666 copies of a CD, or plays a record backwards. These assumptions barely scratch the surface of a cult, used to shock people. For Crowley, the number 93 had a special meaning, as it is the cabbalistic value of his name. But of course nothing in the world will change when you write down such a number. Like the pilgrimages to the Indian Maharishis that were so in vogue in London in the late 1960s and bands like the Stones and the Beatles using sitars. If people put an upside-down pentagram or a Baphomet on a cover, you have to see it in the light of that context. Usually it has no real meaning.’ To bring things further into perspective, he adds, ‘Anton LaVey, who established the Church of Satan in 1966, was a kind of pop star, a lion tamer at a carnival. He kept a lion in his basement at his home, until it got to be too big and began disturbing the neighbours by roaring at night. After an accident, he had to give it to a zoo.’ Kenneth Anger is the personification of America’s bad conscience. He deals with deviant subculture as much as he deals with what he helped to define as the subconscious, popular iconography of the myth of the outlaw, archetypal symbols, mysticism and the parallel world of Hollywood. His work reflects a powerful criticism of fetishizing modernity, technology and speed, whose societal core is hackneyed and bourgeois. The film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) can therefore be seen as a study of the erotic relationship between flashy cars and their owners, or in short, the automobile in its ultimate Freudian interpretation as a contemporary fetish. Like in Fireworks (1947), society and sadomasochism play a leading role, and the film’s surrealistic poetry ensures that this early homoerotic masterpiece makes an impression. Some of the character’s attitudes appear reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s installation, Le Visage de Mae West, from which it seems that Anger also worked his knowledge of art history into his films.

The Beauty of the Beast

Anger is often accused of glorifying violence and producing sexually aberrant films. But he never was interested in a healthy common sense. More accurately, his films are merciless references to prevailing societal practices and shortcomings. ‘I have a vision of my own, of what is beautiful. My thinking is actually close to Leni Riefenstahl’s Schönheit. My thinking is actually close to Riefenstahl’s. But I found the way that Riefenstahl visualized the Nuba in Africa – I do have to say that – anything but beautiful or noble. I let her know that, personally. All the ugly and horrible things that she came across in Africa were simply left out of the images because they did not concur with the picture she wanted to present of an old, noble race living in connection with the past. I have my own vision about what should be brought in front of the camera, but I don’t explain what is beautiful or what is not.Shock and horror can make up a part of the whole story. Picasso’s Guernica, for example, from 1937, visualizes a despicable crime: the bombing of an innocent village for the sole purpose of demonstrating that it could be done. The inhabitants of Guernica were not particularly Franco’s enemies. They were merely being used to demonstrate what the allied armies of Franco and the fascists of Germany and Italy were capable of doing with their airplanes. It was terror for the sake of terror.’I asked him how, as an American of German heritage who has always used current events in his work, he looks at 9/11. Anger: ‘I expect that 9/11 sooner or later was unavoidable. It is an example of an unequal battle in which a small enemy succeeds in doing something colossal. This struggle ‘David versus Goliath’ is based on a real clash of cultures. There is a group of fanatics in the Moslem world who has the idea that they hate everything of what America and the West symbolize. If we were to let them have their way, all films and photographs would be destroyed. I do not believe that as an artist you can be tolerant towards someone who wants to destroy you and every means of expression you have as an artist.’In the meantime, things seem relatively quiet where Kenneth Anger’s film production is concerned. But this is not true: Anger is and remains famous and infamous, a notorious person because of the fact that he continues to work on his films, as a never-completed work in progress. He is a perfectionist who travels the entire globe in order to re-edit his own work, again and again. An important goal now is getting his work released on DVD. Ten hours of film need to be made available, and the octogenarian filmmaker is also currently working on the DVD release of his most recent film on the phenomenon of Mickey Mouse, called Mouse Heaven. It threatens to be a final revenge.The DVD of The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 1 (2006), was released in January 2007, as was the long-awaited DVD by American company Fantoma. www.fantoma.com. It comprises Angers films between 1947 and 1954.Part III of Hollywood Babylon is also awaiting release. He finally intends to complete I will!, a film on the Hitler Youth, which he has been working on for the last ten years. A comprehensive introduction to the complex universe of Kenneth Anger is providedBy the film Anger Me (2006, A Few Steps Productions; www.angerme.com) by Elio Gelmini.Linkswww.angerme.comwww.thefilmjournal.comwww.kinseyinstitute.orgwww.subcin.com