Kenneth Anger, the shocking and influential avant-garde artist who defied sexual and religious taboos in such short films as âScorpio Risingâ and âFireworksâ and dished the most lurid movie star gossip in his underground classic âHollywood Babylon,â has died. He was 96.
Anger died of natural causes on May 11 in Yucca Valley, California, his artist liaison, Spencer Glesby, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Few so boldly and imaginatively mined the forbidden depths of culture and consciousness as Anger, whose admirers ranged from filmmakers Martin Scorsese and David Lynch to rock stars such as the Clash and the Rolling Stones.
He was among the first openly gay filmmakers and a pioneer in using soundtracks as counterpoints to moving pictures. Well before the rise of punk and heavy metal, Anger was juxtaposing music with bikers, sadomasochism, occultism and Nazi imagery. When the Sex Pistols and the Clash appeared on the same bill at a 1976 concert, clips from Angerâs movies were screened behind them.
Anger had his greatest commercial success, and notoriety, as the author of âHollywood Babylon.â Scandal and Hollywood practically grew up together, and Anger assembled an extraordinary and often apocryphal family album, whether pictures from the fatal car crash of Jayne Mansfield or such widely disputed allegations as actor Clara Bow having sex with the University of Southern California football team.
Completed in the late 1950s and originally published in French, âHollywood Babylonâ was banned for years in the U.S. and was still adult fare upon formal release in 1975, when New York Times reviewer Peter Andrews labeled it a â306-page box of poisoned bon bonsâ written as if a âsex maniac had taken over the Readerâs Digest Condensed Book Club.â
âIf a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit,â Andrews concluded.
Like a studio head trying to build a franchise, Anger released a sequel, the less popular âHollywood Babylon II,â in 1984. He had said he was working on a third book in recent years, with a chapter dedicated to Tom Cruise and Scientology.
A balding, dark-eyed man with a frozen stare and a âLuciferâ tattoo across his chest, Anger made films for much of his life and knew everyone from the poet Jean Cocteau to sexologist Alfred Kinsey. He was close enough to Keith Richards that the Rolling Stone would claim that Anger called him his âright hand man.â Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelinâs Jimmy Page wrote soundtrack music for Anger, who in turn helped bring about a Rolling Stones classic by lending a copy of Mikhail Bulgakovâs satanic satire âThe Master and Margaritaâ to Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull passed the novel along to her boyfriend, Jagger, who cited it as the basis for âSympathy for the Devil.â
Anger himself rejected Christianity in childhood, saying he preferred reading comics on Sunday. He later joined Thelema, an occult society which urges members to âDo what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will,â and for a time he lived in the house of Thelema founder Aleister Crowley, a friend and mentor.
Born in Santa Monica, California, Anger was the son of aircraft engineer Wilbur Anglemeyer and cited his grandmother, a costume designer, as an early source for prime Hollywood dirt. He was a child actor who, to much skepticism, claimed to have played the Changeling Prince in a 1935 adaptation of âA Midsummer Nightâs Dream.â
Anger also began making movies as a boy and was a teenager when he completed âFireworks,â a noirish 13-minute silent starring Anger as a young man who fantasizes â in sexually graphic detail â that he has been beaten by a pack of sailors. By this time, the filmmaker had shortened his last name to Anger.
âI knew it would be like a label, a logo. Itâs easy to remember,â Anger told The Guardian in 2011.
Among the filmâs early viewers was Kinsey, who liked it enough to purchase a copy for $100 and ask Anger to help with his landmark research on sexual behavior.
Angerâs best known works included the surreal occult short âInauguration of the Pleasure Domeâ and âScorpio Rising,â a 28-minute production from 1963 in which footage of motorcyclists is accompanied by such hits as Bobby Vintonâs âBlue Velvetâ and Elvis Presleyâs â(Youâre the) Devil in Disguise.â In one especially provocative sequence, the Crystalsâ hit âHeâs a Rebelâ is played to images of Jesus and his disciples from Cecil B. DeMilleâs silent epic âKing of Kings.â
âLike many people, I was astonished when I saw Kenneth Angerâs âScorpio Risingâ for the first time,â Scorsese once wrote. âEvery cut, every camera movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable, in the same way that images of the Virgin in Renaissance painting seem inevitable.â
Scorsese would emulate Angerâs style in âMean Streets,â âGoodfellasâ and other movies, and Lynch featured Vintonâs drowsy ballad in the 1986 cult favorite âBlue Velvet.â John Waters would praise Anger as one of the directors who âdirtiedâ his mind.
Death preoccupied Anger and he was a frequent visitor to Hollywood Forever, the burial site for everyone from Judy Garland to Johnny Ramone. Actor Vincent Gallo, a friend of Angerâs, told the filmmaker that he had purchased a plot for him next to Ramoneâs.
âTheyâre peaceful,â Anger said during a 2014 interview with Esquire when asked about his affinity for cemeteries. âTheyâd better be...â
Hillel Italie, The Associated Press
