Kenneth Anger, the experimental filmmaker and author whose work was groundbreaking in its exploration of gay themes and erotica, has died. He was 96.
His death was announced by his gallery, Sprueth Magers.
Related Stories
“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023),” the gallery posted on social media. “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
Anger’s films include the 1947 Fireworks, a legendary cinematic achievement in the history of American gay culture and film. He also wrote and published Hollywood Babylon in 1959, a book that popularized scandals and pieces of film-land gossip that, while largely discredited over the years, have remained part of Hollywood lore.
“Anger considered cinematographic projection a psychosocial ritual capable of unleashing physical and emotional energies,” said his gallery owners Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers in a statement. “The artist saw film as nothing less than a spiritual medium, a conveyer of spectacular alchemy that transforms the viewer.”
A pioneer in the field of avant-garde film and video art, Anger’s short films were characterized by what his gallery describes as “a mystical-symbolic visual language and phantasmagorical-sensual opulence that underscores the medium’s transgressive potential.” The films are often credited with have a deep impact on the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, particularly queer iconography.
With his early films utilizing then-novel montage techniques, Anger broke into the avant-garde scene in 1947 with the 14-minute Fireworks, a work that brought obscenity charges due to its depictions of gay imagery including cruising, sexual violence and the “sailor fetish” visuals that would find their way into everything from the Tom of Finland illustrations to the Village People.
That film, which used fireworks explosions as visual metaphors for male orgasm, was followed by the 38-minute Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), which featured surreal Technicolor imagery to convey, as Sprueth Magers describes, “a sexually charged, orgiastic mixture of myth and ecstasy somewhere between period film set, opera stage, Kabuki theater and nightclub.”
Anger’s impact on MTV-era music videos and their quick-cut, surreal montage techniques, was made explicit in the Frankie Goes To Hollywood video “Relax,” taken from the band’s album with the Anger-inspired title Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
Subsequent films included Scorpio Rising (1963), an occult-infused work that did for biker culture what Fireworks did for sailors. Set to a soundtrack of popular songs of the day — “Blue Velvet,” “Hit the Road Jack,” “Heat Wave,” among many others — Scorpio Rising has been cited as an influence by such directors as Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn, and, as with Fireworks, ’80s-era rockers like Adam Ant, who included a song called “Scorpio Rising” on a 1985 album.
Anger courted ongoing controversy with his incorporation of both satanic imagery in his works. His uncompleted 1969 film My Demon Brother starred a young Bobby Beausoleil, who would achieve later and greater fame as a member of the Charles Manson Family. Footage from that film was incorporated into Anger’s 1969 short film Invocation of My Demon Brother, which included music by Mick Jagger, who, along with Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and others, appeared in the film. The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” was inspired, at least in part, by Anger’s films.
The filmmaker also had a significant influence on Los Angeles lore with his 1959 book Hollywood Babylon, a compendium of Hollywood gossip and scandals from the industry’s earliest days to the 1950s. The book was banned in the United States until the mid-1960s, and while largely derided as mostly fiction, Hollywood Babylon included tales of Charles Chaplin, Lupe Vélez, Rudolph Valentino, Errol Flynn, Frances Farmer, Ramon Novarro, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Fatty Arbuckle, Marilyn Monroe and, in later editions, Sharon Tate that would stubbornly endure for years.
Must Read Stories
Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.