Kenneth Anger, a Hollywood child who became one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation and whose influence is still felt in popular visual culture, from films to music videos, died May 11 in the town of Yucca Valley, California It borders to Joshua Tree National Park. He was 96.
His death at an assisted living center was confirmed on Wednesday by Spencer Glesby, a spokesman for Sprüth Magers, a gallery that has represented Mr Anger since 2009. He said an announcement of the death was delayed due to matters involving Mr Anger’s estate being put in order.
Mr. Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground art and mass culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers made such generous or subversive use of popular iconography. And with its sensual, mystical imagery and groundbreaking use of pop soundtracks, perhaps no one has seen his work re-enter the mainstream anytime soon.
Mr. Anger’s best-known film is Scorpio Rising (1963), a fetishistic look at a Brooklyn biker gang with a soundtrack packed with pop hits – sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles and Little Peggy March, among others that sound and image can be combined to create something more powerful than the sum of their parts. It is widely considered to be the forerunner of the music video, and its influence can be felt in films as diverse as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. (The Bobby Vinton hit that gave the Lynch film its title is also heard in Scorpio Rising.)
Mr. Anger was hailed in his later years as the originator of remix culture and prided himself on being an outsider, not affiliated with any particular movement. When asked in 2004 about his position as a godfather of queer cinema, he replied: “I don’t like being put in a skullcap.”
He was comfortable in the company of the famous. His acquaintances, some of whom worked with him, included poet and artist Jean Cocteau, playwright Tennessee Williams, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, writer Anaïs Nin, and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
But he also outraged celebrities with his garish telly book Hollywood Babylon. Packed with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino — Mr. Anger’s grandmother was a silent film wardrobe master — the book was widely faked before its official release in the United States in 1975.
Mr. Anger’s reputation as a filmmaker rested on a relatively small body of work: nine short, wordless films totaling less than three hours made between 1947 and 1972 that became known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, like Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Commands (1965), were fragments of longer works that were never completed due to lack of funds. Mr. Anger often abandoned and restarted projects, sometimes reworking his films and presenting slightly modified versions of them.
He was fascinated by the interplay of ancient myths and pop culture. Several of his films simultaneously depict and stage rituals, using sound and editing to create trance-like, incantatory works, such as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), which shows a party with guests dressed as pagan deities . Mr. Anger compared making a movie to casting a spell.
Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer was born on February 3, 1927 in Santa Monica, California to Wilbur and Lillian (Coler) Anglemyer. His father was an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft. Many details of his biography as he told it – similar to the scandalous stories in “Hollywood Babylon” – are difficult to confirm. (He claimed to have played the role of the young prince in the 1935 film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although Mickey Rooney, a star of the film, said the role was played by a girl.) He said he started it to make films a child.
Mr. Anger’s earliest surviving film, Fireworks (1947), filmed when he was 20, is a cinematic milestone in form and content: a dreamlike psychodrama and autobiographical coming-out film, shot at his parents’ home, while they were away for a funeral. Mr. Anger appears as a young man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of muscle-bound sailors, one of whom opens his pants to reveal a Roman candle.
Guests at the film’s first screening included Mr. Anger Kinsey, who he says bought a copy of Fireworks for his collection, and filmmaker James Whale, best known for Frankenstein. In 1950, encouraged by an admiring letter from Cocteau about Fireworks, Mr. Anger moved to Paris, where he spent much of the following decade working as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.
Mr. Anger completed a film while in Europe, Eaux d’Artifice (1953), which was shot in the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. Footage for another film, Rabbit’s Moon, which features characters from the tradition of commedia dell’arte theater, remained in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française for two decades; Two versions of the film were released in the 1970s.
He filmed “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” while visiting home in Los Angeles. Since it was difficult to get money, he made a living by writing Hollywood Babylon, which was first published in France in 1959.
Back in the 1960s in the United States, Mr. Anger entered a productive phase that resulted in some of his most admired works. One of the most well-known experimental films of all time, “Scorpio Rising” sees leather-clad bikers tending to their motorcycles, throwing a hilarious Halloween party and desecrating a church. Mr. Anger used provocative juxtapositions: Nazi imagery and clips from a film about the life of Jesus.
The manager of a Los Angeles movie theater that showed “Scorpio Rising,” which features frontal nudity, was arrested on obscenity charges, and a lewdness lawsuit against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Anger’s favor.
As the counterculture movement peaked in the mid-’60s, Mr. Anger moved to San Francisco, where his associates included Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who became a member of what became known as the Manson family.
Mr. Anger spent much of that time developing and filming a project called “Lucifer Rising,” which envisioned Lucifer not as a devil but as a god of light and “the patron saint of movies,” as Mr. Anger put it. Mr Anger, a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, described cinema as an “evil force”. He had the word “Lucifer” tattooed on his chest.
Much of the original material from ‘Lucifer Rising’ is said to have been lost – Mr Anger accused Mr Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it – but some salvaged material made its way into the orgiastic ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’ (1969), the one Contains synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.
Completed in 1972 and revised several times, Lucifer Rising’s rebirth theme contrasts with Mr. Anger’s death-obsessed works of the previous decade. Mr Beausoleil, who was now serving a life sentence for murder, wrote the score in prison.
The film completed the Magick Lantern cycle and after that, Mr. Anger almost completely retired from filmmaking for about 20 years. He released Hollywood Babylon II in 1984, but otherwise it was a period of relative inactivity for Mr. Anger, although it coincided with the arrival of the music video and the emergence of quick cuts in mainstream cinema, and he was coming to rest for his influence appreciated on both.
Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Mr. Anger’s inconsistency is the stuff of many anecdotes. Friendships and collaborations have been known to end with Mr. Anger threatening to curse the party in question, as happened with Mr. Beausoleil and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, originally responsible for the production of Lucifer Rising. -Scores had been engaged.
Mr. Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, producing a number of short films including Mouse Heaven (2004), about the Mickey Mouse cult; “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007), an elegy to singer Elliott Smith; and “I Will!” (2008), a short film compiled from archive material of the Hitler Youth movement. The critical response to the new work was generally moderate and the focus continued to be on his earlier films. Magick Lantern’s works have been released on DVD in restored versions and installed in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.
Mr. Anger had no immediate survivors. Before moving into the assisted living facility, he lived in Los Angeles.
In an essay for a DVD release in 2007, Mr. Scorsese praised the poetic rhythms of Mr. Anger’s films and what he called their “inevitable” logic.
“The structure, the form, the feel of these films,” wrote Mr. Scorsese, “seems less contrived than from a source hidden from the rest of us.”
Alex Traub contributed to the coverage.