KENNETH ANGER

(1927 - 2023)
FILM ::: MAKERS :::

Kenneth Anger was born February 3, 1927, in Santa Monica, California, and spent his life treating cinema as a forbidden art rather than an industry. He emerged early as both participant and provocateur, appearing as a child actor in Fireworks (1947), a short film that detonated American underground cinema with its homoerotic imagery, dream logic, and unapologetic defiance of postwar morality. At a time when Hollywood sold reassurance, Anger offered ritual, desire, and danger. His films didn’t tell stories so much as cast spells, aligning him with the lineage of Maya Deren and the European avant-garde rather than anything coming out of studio backlots.

Anger’s work fused cinema with occult philosophy, drawing heavily on the teachings of Aleister Crowley and the sexual-scientific inquiries of Alfred Kinsey. Films like Scorpio Rising (1963) stitched together leather, motorcycles, pop music, and religious imagery into a volatile collage that scandalized censors and rewired the grammar of film editing. Anger rejected originality as a polite concept—he embraced appropriation, repetition, and montage decades before music videos and remix culture made those strategies mainstream. His cinema was not entertainment; it was initiation.

Beyond the films, Anger’s influence metastasized through culture. His books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II tore into the myth of the movie industry, exposing scandal, cruelty, and hypocrisy with gleeful venom. Though factually dubious in places, the books permanently altered how Hollywood would be perceived—less dream factory, more crime scene. His gravitational pull extended outward: Tennessee Williams, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and Marianne Faithfull all orbited his world, while later filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and John Waters absorbed his lesson: cinema could be transgressive, personal, and heretical. Kenneth Anger didn’t just influence underground film—he poisoned the well of respectability, and culture has been drinking from it ever since.