In FIREWORKS I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary release. 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.
"FIREWORKS comes from that beautiful night from which emerge all the true works. It touches the quick of the soul and this is very rare." - Jean Cocteau
"The dream of aggression has as its target not only Anger himself, but the external society which acts as omnipotent repressive force. Thus in its iconography of matches, Christmas trees and roman candles, it satirizes social institutions in the manner of Buñuel's L'Age d'Or. As Anger himself has ironically put it: 'This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas and the Fourth of July.'" - Lucy Fisher, A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema
1947, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
Concept, direction, camera and editing by Kenneth Anger. Music by Jonathan Halper. Filmed in Hollywood. Cast: Yvonne Marquis (Star).
"A lavishly colored evocation of the Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of a 1920s film star.
"PUCE MOMENT is a fragment from an abandoned film project entitled Puce Woman. The soundtrack used here is the second one; the first was the overture to Verdi's I Villi. The film reflects Anger's concerns with the myths and decline of Hollywood, as well as with the ritual of dressing, with the movement from the interior to the exterior, and with color and sound synchronization ...." - Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts
1949, 16mm, color/so, 6.5m, $20
Concept, direction and editing by Kenneth Anger. Camera Assistant: Thad Lovett. Music by Vivaldi. Filmed in Tivoli (Italy). Cast: Carmila Salvatorelli (Lady).
"EAUX D'ARTIFICE, featuring a circus dwarf Anger met in Italy, owes its costume design to Anger's grand-mother in whose costumes he as a boy loved dressing up. Anger calls the Lady in the film 'a Firbank heroine in pursuit of a nightmoth,' which allusion P. Adams Sitney traces to Ronald Firbank's novel Valmouth 'where Niki-Esther, at the time of her marriage, went into the garden in pursuit of a butterfly, dressed in her wedding gown and carrying her bouquet.'
"The film was shot in black and white and printed through a blue filter and the Lady's 'Fan of Exorcism' was hand-tinted by Anger. Of all his works, this is perhaps the most abstract; the rushing, flowing, trickling waters become interesting as shapes and rhythms." - Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts
1953, 16mm, color/so, 13m, $40
The film is derived from one of Crowley's dramatic rituals where people in the cult assume the identity of a god or a goddess. In other words, it's the equivalent of a masquerade party - they plan this for a whole year and on All Sabbath's Eve they come as gods and goddesses that they have identified with and the whole thing is like an improvised happening.
This is the actual thing the film is based on. In which the gods and goddesses interact and in THE INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME it's the legend of Bacchus that's the pivotal thing and it ends with the god being torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. This is the underlying thing. But rather than using a specific ritual, which would entail quite a lot of the spoken word as ritual does, I wanted to create a feeling of being carried into a world of wonder. And the use of color and phantasy is progressive; in other words, it expands, it becomes completely subjective - like when people take communion; and one sees it through their eyes.
"A highly ingenious Chinese torment!" - Jean Cocteau
1954, 16mm, color/so, 38m, $115
Concept, direction, camera and editing by Kenneth Anger. Music by Little Peggy March, The Angels, Bobby Vinton, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, The Crystals, The Rondells, Kris Jensen, Claudine Clark, Gene McDaniels, The Surfari. Filmed in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Cast: Bruce Byron (Scorpio), Johnny Sapienza (Taurus), Frank Carifi (Leo), John Palone (Pinstripe), Ernie Allo (Joker), Barry Rubin (Fall Guy), Steve Crandell (Blondie), Bill Dorfmann (Back), Johnny Dodds (Kid).
A "high" view of the Myth of the American Motorcyclist. The machine as totem, from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather. Part I - Boys & Bolts. Part II - Image Maker. Part III - Walpurgis Party. Part IV - Rebel Rouser.
"... a masterpiece in the specific sense that it is composed of clarities of the fire and water workings of your earlier films into a ritual of order, depth and complexity." - Stan Brakhage
Awards: First Prize, Evian, France, 1966; Golden Cup, 11th Festival of Rapallo, Italy, 1965; First Prize, Third Annual Independent Filmmakers' Festival, Foothill College Film Festival; First Prize, Documentary - cited for "plastic research and expressive qualities" - Poretta Terme Festival of Free Cinema, Italy, 1964.
1963, 16mm, color/so, 29m, $90
Concept, Direction and Editing: Kenneth Anger; Camera Assistant: Arnold Baskin; Music: The Parris Sisters; Cast: Sandy Trent (Car Customizer). Filmed in San Bernardino.
Pygmalion and his machine mistress.
To the soundtrack of "Dream Lover" a young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff.
"KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS was originally to be an eight-part, 30-minute film which Anger describes as 'an oneiric vision of a contemporary American (and specifically Californian) teenage phenomenon, the world of hot-rod and customized cars.' Anger made the episode presently shown as KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS to raise funds to finish the film, but was unable to do so and the project was abandoned." - Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts
1965, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m, $20
The Shadowing forth of Lord Lucifer, as the Powers gather at a midnight mass.
"A film that no number of viewings will ever exhaust, a film that will always remain a source of mysterious energy as only great works of art do." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice "Anger's purest visual achievement ... a conjuration of pagan forces that comes off the screen in a surge of spiritual and mystical power. It has weirdly compelling imagery, with a soundtrack by Mick Jagger on a Moog Synthesizer that has the insistent hallucinatory power of voodoo." - Richard Whitehall, LA Free Press
Awards: Tenth Independent Film Award (for the year 1969) by Film Culture. This Award was presented "for his film INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER specifically, and for his entire creative work in general; for his unique fusion of magick, symbolism, myth, mystery, and vision with the most modern sensibilities, techniques, and rhythms of being; for revealing it all in a refreshed light, persistently, constantly, and with a growing complexity of means and content; at the same time, for doing it with an amazing clarity, directness and sureness."
1969, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $30
(long version)
Concept, direction and editing by Kenneth Anger. Camera Assistant: Tourjansky. Filmed in Paris. Cast: Andre Soubeyran (Pierrot), Claude Revenant (Harlequin), Nadine Valence (Columbine).
Fable of the Unattainable (the Moon) combining elements of commedia dell'arte with Japanese myth.
"RABBIT'S MOON seems to me your finest film, most perfect and, oh all together finest!, of the sharpest clarity. Beautiful, yet beauty balanced by dreadful necessity, so that it is an emblem of the soul's experience: signature .... And I think my turn-of-mind here especially appropriate because I also saw this film as your autobiography, all the figures in it aspects of yourself, its magical progress a kind of 'story of your life.'" - Stan Brakhage
1972, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $60
"LUCIFER RISING ... is perhaps Anger's most ambitious work to date; its subject - Lucifer, the fallen angel - has possessed and inspired Anger for a decade. Christian theology views Lucifer as the personification of evil; Anger's task was to depict him as a bringer of light, God's beautiful but rebellious favorite. ... Edited in a number of forms during the past ten years, Anger's LUCIFER RISING has consistently displayed magnificent landscape and seascape cinematography as well as memorable performances by Marianne Faithfull, Anger himself (as the Magus), and prominent members of London's cultural scene. For the expanded edition, however, Anger has recut the entire work, and added a haunting music track recorded behind the walls of Tracy Prison by his original Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, now serving a life sentence there.
"Anger has called LUCIFER RISING 'visual music': ... it awakens ideas and feelings almost without the aid of characters or story. The viewer, like Lucifer, awakens mysteriously, magically to a new vision of the world in which everything is miraculous and strange." - American Federation of the Arts press release
1980, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $90
An evocation of the British occult master Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) through the drawings, paintings and objects by and about him. These artifacts were assembled from the collections of Keith Richmond, Jimmy Page and the Ordo Templi Orientis International. The title is a reference to an infamous headline in the Sunday Express denouncing Crowley, and also punningly to hanging his pictures.
2002, 16mm, color/so 15m, $45
Includes all of the above titles by Kenneth Anger.
1947-1980, 16mm, color/so, 3hrs, $375