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Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, 1963, 35 mm, coloration, sound, 28 minutes. Kenneth Anger.
KENNETH ANGER was an audacious filmmaker, a self-proclaimed magus, a never-closeted queer, a shameless scandalmonger, a someday Satanist, a tough individual, and, as P. Adams Sitney put it, the “acutely aware artificer of his personal fable.” He was additionally the King of Pop—at the very least that’s what I believed on first seeing Scorpio Rising (1963) within the mid-Sixties, age sixteen, at New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork.
There have been different motion pictures on that program; I bear in mind being impressed by Gregory Markopoulos’s Ming Inexperienced and Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity. However Scorpio Rising blew the whole lot else away: the enameled Kodachrome-on-Kodachrome coloration, the deadpan sacrilege, the quotations from comedian strips and Mad journal, however primarily the music. Scorpio Rising was wall-to-wall AM radio, all however considered one of its twelve songs a Prime 40 hit between Could 1962 and September 1963, precisely the junior highschool interval after I obtained nightly transmissions from Murray the Ok’s “Swingin’ Soiree.” I didn’t essentially love the songs, however I knew them in my bones.
The extra venturesome members of the artwork world didn’t want to satisfy the Beatles and even the Supremes to hip them to Prime 40. The likes of Tony Conrad, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ivan Karp, and Wynn Chamberlain have been venturing out to downtown Brooklyn to dig Murray the Ok’s unbelievable reveals on the 4,000-seat Fox Theatre. (Years earlier than the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the Ok was deploying to the strobe!) Anger, nevertheless, was the primary to place teenage moron music in a film.
Its destiny sealed by the generational horror of American Graffiti, Scorpio inevitably turned nostalgic. Now that “My Boyfriend’s Again” gave its title to a Sandy Duncan automobile, “Hit the Street Jack” has been used to promote auto insurance coverage, and Whoopi Goldberg lined “I Will Observe Him” in Sister Act, it’s historical historical past. However the level for me, again within the mid ’60s, was not recognition however revelation: sound and picture, Susan Sontag’s “radical juxtaposition”! (Not till I noticed Godard’s 1967 Two or Three Issues I Know About Her a number of years later would I so viscerally get the essence of montage.) The music made stuff occur. The spectacle of clueless hitter sorts moving into biker drag whereas Bobby Vinton crooned “she wore blue velvet” or Jesus coming into the body because the Crystals sang “He’s a Insurgent” cracked me up. Nonetheless do.
Anger is a central determine in my sense of film historical past. (Having found the unique paperback Hollywood Babylon in a Occasions Sq. used journal retailer, I dedicated it to reminiscence together with Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema.) He reliably inserted himself into cinema’s margins. The once-scandalous Fireworks (1947) may function a brief topic with, if not an inspiration for, Cocteau’s Orphée (1950); the unfinished Puce Second (1949) is the actual Sundown Boulevard. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is a perverse riff on the biblical spectacles of the Fifties; Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) ought to preface each screening of Straightforward Rider (1969), to say solely one of many motion pictures that crawled from beneath Scorpio’s leather-based jacket. Nothing will get the madness of the late ’60s extra convincingly than Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) or the ascendence of whole animation extra entertainingly than Anger’s late in life, not often seen Mouse Heaven (2004).
Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, 1963, 35 mm, coloration, sound, 28 minutes.
A legendary determine in avant-garde movie circles, Anger returned to the USA in 1962 after a decade in Paris, transferring to New York, the place he stayed on the Brooklyn Heights residence of filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas. “It was like visiting a international nation,” he later recalled. “Brooklyn was as unusual to me as darkest Africa.” Cruising the Coney Island boardwalk, he found a gang of motorcyclists hanging out by the Cyclone and was impressed to make a documentary portrait. (They accepted him as a digicam nut.)
With its mock-heroic imaginative and prescient of city youth tradition, figuring out homoeroticism, copious media quotations, and blasphemous juxtaposition of Hitler and Christ, Scorpio Rising was an on the spot sensation. Jonas Mekas known as it “poisonously sensuous” and, having lived as a youth underneath German occupation, noticed one thing extra: “The pull of fascist energy, muscle and metal and pace.” Enjoyable reality: The identical night time that Scorpio Rising had its 2 AM “sneak preview,” Andy Warhol screened the primary installment of his “serial” Kiss. It additionally materialized a number of months after that different deranged doc of depravity, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
Smith and Anger have been differing types. Anger collected Rudolph Valentino memorabilia; Smith worshipped Maria Montez. Anger considered his movies as burnished jewels; Smith proudly used trash. Though a postcard from Anger was found in Smith’s “archives,” it’s exhausting to think about them being geniuses collectively for greater than 5 minutes. (I be aware in passing that neither divo had the heart to place the irrepressible Taylor Mead in a movie.) If Flaming Creatures was essentially the most influential of underground motion pictures, Scorpio Rising was the most well-liked.*
Each motion pictures drew on Hollywood, pop music, and drag. Each have been steeped in subculture. Each have been busted days aside, on reverse coasts, for a similar factor—male frontal nudity, just about in your face. Anger, who didn’t lack a humorousness, would declare that he was sued by the American Nazi Occasion for desecrating the swastika! Talking of phallocratic fascism, I might like to see the pea-brained would-be Mussolini who governs Florida try to parse Anger’s legendary assertion that the one satan he ever worshipped was Mickey Mouse.
J. Hoberman continues to be pondering the Sixties . . .
*I labored on the Movie-makers Cooperative through the summer time of 1970 cleansing movies and shlepping them to the submit workplace: There have been one thing like twelve prints of Scorpio Rising in fixed demand from faculty movie societies and Madison Avenue advert businesses. (Michael Snow’s Wavelength ranked second, with six prints.)
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