6/23/2023 0 Comments Alfred kinsey child abuse![]() ![]() Later, tinkering as he did with nearly all his films (“works in progress, until I die,” he told Richard Henderson in 2004 in The Wire 247), he tried Electric Light Orchestra’s album Eldorado (1974), revising self-consciously towards the reputation as pop-sound selector he would earn with his next, and most famous film.Īnger first encountered the subjects for Scorpio Rising (1963) on Coney Island while staying in a garret above the apartment of his New York City hosts, Marie Menken and William Maas. When Harry Partch objected to recordings of his being used in the film, Anger replaced them with Leoš Janáček’s tense and splendid Glagolitic Mass. Pleasure Dome’s outwardly occult motifs, delirious colours, and mandalian superimpositions make it a work of psychedelia avant la lettre. Inspired by a bohemian Los Angeles costume party, Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) cast Anaïs Nin alongside Marjorie Cameron, the witchy Thelemite widow of rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Fireworks’ obvious, though coyly disguised sexual content (a sailor pulls a strategically-placed Roman candle from his fly) landed the film maker the first of several obscenity charges, as well as the attention of sexologist Alfred Kinsey, future friend and patron. Ottorini Respighi’s late romantic tone poem Pines Of Rome sets the mood, its flourishes evoking another of Anger’s great early influences, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Along with Maya Deren, Anger broke Buñuelian surrealism in America with a shift in subject position and intensity: the young gay cruiser’s desires are a threat, not just to his ego, but to his very bodily life. Significantly, his version sidesteps any racial dimension, transforming a mob attack into a rite of homosexual initiation and human sacrifice – with the filmmaker casting himself as ambivalent victim. His first major film, Fireworks (1947), restaged as psycho-drama a moment of violence he witnessed at the hands of Navy sailors during Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots. He made his first films (now lost) reborn under his self-baptised moniker: Anger. Immersed in the demi-monde of Los Angeles, he was drawn to sadomasochism, and to a lifetime discipline in Thelema, the ‘sex-magick’ cult of Aleister Crowley. Like the superimpositions that populate his films, these thwarted dreams of stardom, and an arrest as a teenager for homosexuality, form a skeleton key to his artistic sensibility, one preoccupied with ritual pageantry, menaced eroticism, and a melancholic child’s eye for playthings great and small. Years later, Anger would cling to a disputed (and now finally disproved) claim that it was he, rather than Sheila Brown, who played the Changeling Child in Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), though to look at a production photo one might still momentarily believe. ![]() As a boy, his costume seamstress grandmother imprinted him with glamorous and sordid Hollywood gossip, and brought him to his first double feature: the Al Jolson picture The Singing Fool and Sol Lesser’s recut of Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!. He was born Kenneth Anglemeyer to a middle class family in Santa Monica, California. Creative triumphs were stalked by catastrophe off screen recrimination, destitution, and death a persistent, buzzing cloud, as though brought down by one of the baleful gods conjured in the dazzling ritual spaces of his films. But eccentricity and anti-sociality plagued a personal life which – as auteur and artistic tyrant – Anger could or would not separate from his work. Few in the pantheon of American cinema’s mid-century underground made work of more consequence to popular culture than Anger, who rode the full pendulum swing of the 60s counterculture, and fused the romantic decadence of the European avant garde and the anarchic exuberance of postwar American youth culture into a unique and confrontational poetic signature. The end of the long, legendary life of Kenneth Anger (1927-2023) last month brings a sombre, if long foreseen resolution to the peculiar state of tension in which the film maker always seemed to exist with his public. ![]()
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