Week of January 10, 2007, Issue #586
FILM
Pleasant film misses the core of Kenneth Anger
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
In Anger Me, a sort of autobiofilmography of Kenneth Anger, the subject is front and centre, which would be fine if the avant-garde director could zoom in on his influences, ideas and aspirations.Instead, Anger Me is a pleasant but not very insightful tour of Anger’s homoerotic phantasmagorias and pagan-dream films. As a companion piece to a retrospective of the man’s work, also showing at Metro Cinema (Jan 11), it’s like a DVD bonus feature, this look-back-in-anger at a strange body of work that influenced such different filmmakers as Brakhage and Scorsese.
Anger offers an outline of his life as clips from his films play behind him. He doesn’t elaborate on his childhood, sexuality, or any other infuential forces in his life, preferring to dip into his 1947 16-mm short, “Fireworks,” which, to my eye (no outside opinions are offered in Anger Me and there’s little mention of contemporary reactions to Anger’s films), was startlingly ahead of its time as an American film in its sexual daring and dreamy, Freudian flow—it’s easy to see why sex-researcher Alfred Kinsey was the first to buy a copy. (Though all Anger says about sex in his films is that he believes in indirectness. Pornography, he notes, is only concerned with boring mechanics: “in and then it’s out—it’s like a sewing machine.”)
Anger’s European exploits began in the Cinémathèque Français, where he was an assistant to Henri Langlois and recut Eisenstein’s haunting Que Viva Mexico. His “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,” one of his more gaudy, feverish films, features Anaïs Nin and others as gods and goddesses.
Also while in Paris, Anger wrote the first of his Hollywood Babylon books, though the frustrating Anger Me doesn’t elaborate on how and why this maverick wished to expose the tawdry, outrageous scandals of Tinseltown’s past legends.
“Scorpio Rising,” Anger’s cheeky fusion of motorcycle-club documentary and Christ imagery (thanks to a religious film that accidentally ended up on Anger’s doorstep), heralded his return to the USA, and in the ’70s, now living in England after a falling-out with young musician Bobby Beausoleil (about whom Anger is notably reticent), he made “Lucifer Rising,” with Marianne Faithful, with its floating superimpositions.
That film and a number of others, culminating in the documentary The Man We Want To Hang, show the influence of paganist and occultist Aleister Crowley (1874-1947), whose Sicilian house murals Anger restored while in Italy in the ’50s. Anger never makes Crowley’s ideas and principles too clear, though the man’s drawings of love-cult objects and deities are obvious influences on the flame-haired sirens, bawdy priestesses and bearded mystics in the director’s pseudo-spiritual, psychedelic films.
This documentary of a self-professed “film poet” scrapes the surface of the art and only skims the surface of the artist. It’s a rather sedate look at a fairly radical filmmaker. V
Fri, Jan 12 - Mon, Jan 15 (9 pm)
Anger Me
Directed by Elio Gelmini
Written by Carlo Vitali
Starring Kenneth Anger
Metro Cinema, $8