Los Angeles, May 25 – The American director, screenwriter and author Kenneth Anger, one of the most influential experimental filmmakers and one of the first to make films comes out in HollywoodAuthor of controversial and cult films in which he dealt with the themes of eroticism and eroticismhomosexuality When they were still taboo, he died at the age of 96 in California’s Yucca Valley. Her disappearance, which happened on May 11 at a care center, was confirmed on Wednesday May 24 by Spencer Glesby, spokesman for Sprüth Magers gallery, which has represented Anger since 2009. Glesby told The New York Times that the announcement of The Death was delayed while matters surrounding Anger’s legacy were resolved.
The director has made about thirty short films, including “Rising Scorpio (1963), which brought him unexpected fame as an experimental filmmaker and became a cult film of American underground culture because of the clear and alienating depiction of youthful images, a model for later films “Easy Rider.”‘ (1969) by Dennis Hopper.
Anger is best known – and for this reason he is also very famous in Italy – as the author of the famous tabloid “The Background of the Star System”.Hollywood Babylon’, first appeared in France in 1959 (Italian translation by Sugar 1960), and was followed by a second volume in 1984, published in the United States (Italian translation by Adelphi 1986). The long-banned book in America also somehow inspired Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which hit theaters last January. With his historical research and testimonies, collected primarily in the first volume, Anger uncovered – and he was one of the first to do so – Pandora’s box of the scandals, of the perversions, of the dark or even hellish sides of the Mecca of cinema: cases of pedophilia, sexual exchanges, drug and alcohol abuse, mysterious crimes committed by stars and starlets, often covered up by the big production companies. A system of horror that has been hiding behind the glamor of the dream factory since its inception.
In the first volume, the chapter titles speak for themselves: “Porco unno” (about the orgies of Eric von Stroheim), “The Garage of Death” (about the mysterious ending of Thelma Todd), “The Daughter of Rage” (about the madness she fell into Frances Farmer and the tortures he endured), “Heroines to Heroin”, “Mae (West) and the Monster”, “Do it like (Errol) Flynn.” In the second, the titles “Ciak si delira” stand out. (Rita Hayworth with Alzheimer’s, nervous breakdowns Gene Tierney), “Babylon in the bottle” (from Mary Pickford To Robert Mitchum), “Odd Couples” (Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert Cary Grant and Randy Scott)“Joan the Witch,” on all of Crawford’s excesses.
Born in santa monica (California) February 3, 1927. Anger was introduced to the world of entertainment as a child thanks to his grandmother, a Hollywood costume designer, and joined the cast of Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the age of five as an extra. After making seven short films in 16 and 35mm (almost none of which were shown publicly), he shot in 1947 “Fireworks”, presented at the first edition of the famous “Art in Cinema” festival in San Francisco. Fireworks, inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète (1930), later became, along with Un chant d’amour (1950), one of the manifesto films of gay cinema Jean Genet. Homosexuality, narcissism, eroticism and violence, combined in a dreamlike atmosphere, are the central elements of “Fireworks”.
In the following years, Anger shot other short films in Europe (especially in France), including Puce Moment (1949), Rabbit’s Moon (1950, but other versions are also known, from 1972 and 1979) and Eaux d ”. Artifice” (1953), filmed at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. With the “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (on which he worked between 1954 and 1956), the magical-alchemical elements were strengthened and focused on a form of “sexual magic” derived from the teachings of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. In 1958 he made a version of this film – a description of a party intertwining satanic rites and parodies of Hollywood myths – which was projected onto three screens. After his final return to the United States, he completed Scorpio Rising in 1963, followed by Kustom kar kommandos (1964) and another esoteric and satanic themed film, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969).
His most difficult work remains ‘Lucifer’s Rise’ whose filming, which had begun in 1966, was interrupted due to the theft of all the footage by the protagonist Bobby Beausoleil (also the author of the soundtrack); Anger reshot the sequences, but other vicissitudes meant he didn’t release the film until 1980 and in a shorter version than originally conceived. Anger has thinned out his experimental work since the mid-1970s and has since directed a number of titles, most recently 2013’s Airships.