The films of Kenneth Anger, one of the seminal figures of the American avant-garde cinema, have had a pervasive and profound impact on postwar visual culture. Beginning with Fireworks (1947), his first acknowledged film, he forged a hallucinatory, daringly erotic style of nonnarrative filmmaking that evokes an eclectic range of influences, from the poetic films of Jean Cocteau to prosaic Hollywood movies, from the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley and the ceremonies of ancient Egypt to the allures of popular culture and the iconography of the gay underground. Filmmaking for Anger is literally a form of magic, and in works such as Puce Moment (1949), Scorpio Rising (1963), and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), he sought a ritualistic fusion of “dreams, desire, myth, and vision.” He has recently culled a suite of Ultrachrome frame enlargements from the latter film, permitting a detailed appreciation of his visionary compositions and private occultism, with imagery that includes an autumnal equinox ritual, rock concert fantasias, the artist’s tattoos of magic seals, hieroglyphic superimpositions, naked torsos, goldfish bowls, and owl heads.

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Still from Mouse Heaven, 2005. Video, color, sound; 10 min. Collection of the artist

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