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Kenneth Anger
An early, pioneering cult film-maker who made avant-garde short films often using occult or homo-erotic imagery, and frequently exploring hedonistic themes of longing and pleasure. All his films have no dialogue and are basically montages with a musical soundtrack. Obviously worshipped by cult-movie fans, gay artists, and underground film-makers who all abound with overflowing praise, but despite the obviously pioneering and unique work, he's not that interesting. The following list includes the stand-out and popular shorts. Creepy short montage of images with a hypnotic soundtrack by Mick Jagger. Satanic rituals, concert footage, war, drugs, bizarre faces, trippy cinematography, etc. all come together as a disturbing experience. More psychedelic mysticism from Anger. Occult explorations of the mythos of Lucifer, from Egypt, to magick rituals, Stonehenge, and even UFOs. Boasting a trippy soundtrack by a jailed Mansonite, this one is more like a prototypical music video from a time when music videos didn't exist. An experience, even if you don't understand the symbolism and imagery. The mythical eroticism of sailors is explored using male muscle-bound flesh, violence, rape, and some gore all mixed in a dream sequence full of symbolic imagery like fingerless hands, milk, blood-shooting nostrils, and phallic fireworks. Bizarre operatic orgy of costumes, makeup, LSD trips, historical and occult figures performing some kind of ritual of pleasure, swallowing jewelry, wearing bird-cages, feeding each other, drinking strange substances building up to an ecstatic trip of colors, warped and artistic cinematography, disturbing faces, occult symbols, and a kaleidoscope of images. Effective at times but generally overlong and tedious. It is beyond me why this movie is given such high praise. Bikers are shown taking care of their bikes, reading comics and dressing in their near-fetishistic gear and clothes, then gay bikers go wild in a party, riding, a frenzy of pleasure and pain, building to a chaotic orgy, while intercut with Nazi imagery and scenes from a movie of Jesus, all supposedly saying something ironic about idols and pop-culture. Infantile and boring so-called shock cinema. |
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