Looking Back in Anger
Time Out London features an interview with legendary occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger, a longtime devotee of Aleister Crowley, is being honored with a presentation of four of his films (newly transferred from 16mm to 35mm film) at the London Film Festival.
Kenneth Anger in the 1935 version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
“The films on show at the LFF are less overtly magickal, but still constitute mesmeric incantations, rituals in which a protagonist calls forth powers that beguile then threaten to destroy him. Composed with a poet’s eye, they are deliciously scored but have no dialogue; flagrantly heightened yet drawing on familiar reference points, they cast a powerful kind of spell over the audience.”
In addition to talking about film, Ben Walters askes the now 79-year-old Anger about the current repressive attitudes about sexuality in American culture. Anger, who was interviewed by Dr Alfred Kinsey takes the seeming ascendancy of fundamentalist behavior in stride.
“Anger isn’t too alarmed by mainstream America’s increasingly repressive attitude toward sex. ‘As Kinsey said, you’ve got to look at the long view. Over the centuries it’s like a pendulum ? it swings one way into liberality then the pendulum swings the other way into conservatism and even hysteria… The fact that today in the world one culture feels perfectly comfortable in hiding the female body behind burqas, veils and so forth… These battles go on. It isn’t like humanity is enlightened in the 21st century, you know.’”
As for his legacy, Anger does away with any false modesty.
“I know my films are good. I know they’re historically important. I have no false modesty about the few films I’ve been able to afford to make.”
You can find a full listing of Anger’s films, here.
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