Essay draft 2nd trimester: The occult, Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley

Note to Steve: Still working on the outline and structure and the text itself, but this is what I have untill now.

The occult, Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley (or: Occultism and camp sensibility in Kenneth Anger's films)

Introduction:
Kenneth Anger (born in 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker. Throughout his career he has produced around 40 works. In his films, Anger mixes, surrealism, camp homoeroticism together with the occult. With this essay I would like to dive deeper into his world and the content of his films by analyzing it’s occult side. However I cannot only talk about the occult in his work without also mentioning the camp sensibility visible in his work. By doing so I hope to get a better understanding of his work in general and kick of my personal research into avant-garde filmmaking and its practices.

The ritual use of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren
Both Anger and Maya Deren were seen as the forerunners of a generation of visionary filmmakers like Brakhage, Harrington Markopoulos, etc. Often parallels are beeing drawn between the work of Anger and Deren. However in her text Illuminating Lucifer, Carol Rowe argues that “Recent critical work attempting to draw parallels between the films of Derek and Anger through their mutual preoccupation with mystical ritual is misleading.” (Rowe, page 26). I consider this a valid point, but still want to mention shortly that the link between the first films of both artist actually do have similarities with each other. In a conversation with Nicolas Winding (source: youtube, see bibliography), Anger explains that his film Fireworks was based on a dream that occurred to him after having seen sailors fighting in the street. Rowe in her analysis claims that Anger is “Not a surrealist who puts blind faith in his own dream images and trusts his dreams to convey an ‘uncommon unconscious,’” and further argues that the filmmaker “works predominately in archetypical symbols.” (Rowe, page ..). Here she overlooks, or does not mention, the similarities in form, transition, reference and also the dreamlike sequences of the films, Fireworks (1947), At Land (1944), and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).

But as Rowe suggests earlier, there is a difference between the two artists use of ritual in their films. First of all, Deren was concerned with occultism as a classicist, thereby acknowledges it's boundaries and limits, and was interested in recombining its ritual orders within a system. So she experimented with the use of certain traditional forms in structuring her own films. She used and/or was inspired by poetry, Chinese boxing, children's games, circus acts, rituals etc. As Duchamp, a dadaist, was one of her mentors, the overlapping idea of art and game are frequently found in her films and notes, as you can see in her films by the use of for example chess. Initially she wanted to juxtapose games with ritual, but was later afraid that by doing this the viewer would look at the work with an 'amused tolerance' like people look at art or children's games. She wanted to protect the integrity of the rituals, and therefore chose last minute not to include the footage of a child playing on the streets of NYC in her film Ritual in Transfigured Time.

Rowe argues that“Influenced by classical aesthetics, she experimented with trans temporal continuities and discontinuities found in the cinematic structure. With Deren the narrative form orders the subconscious into a design; Ritual is used to impose an ideal order on the arbitrary order of art and the chaotic order of the world. The interior event is presented as a matrix out of which a pattern is made, and this pattern of ritual elements is combined to form the overall structure. Historically, it is useful to view Deren as a forerunner of the works of Alain Resnais or the experimental structuralists of today, such as Frampton, Weiland, or Snow, rather than to see her work as simply a part of the ‘trance film’ trend in the early American underground.” (Rowe, page… )


As an example of the structuralist vision of her work, she got footage of Balinese ritual dancing from anthropologist Gregory Bateson, free to use for her own films. (Note to self: go more into the ritual use of Deren)

Anger on the contrary is a romanticist, yearning for the infinite and the beyond, and sees occultism as a source of hermetic knowledge. As Rowe puts it, “his narrative model is constructed through a comparative analysis of myths, religion and rituals and their associations external to their respective systems” (Rowe …). This model is based on the Thelema religion created by Alister Crowley.

To understand what Thelema is and how it manifests itself in the films of Anger we will have to take a closer look at “the wickedest man in the world”.

Magick, Thalema and "the wickedest man of the world"
Aleister Crowley, naming himself the “Great Beast 666,” is according to Urban “One of the most influential and yet most often misunderstood figures in the history of Western new religious movements.” (Urban, page 7) His article tries to offer a different approach to Crowley, by placing him within contemporary debates about modernism and postmodernism. According to him Crowley still is today, "one of the most influential figures in the modern revival of magic in Neopagan witchcraft." Crowley could be considered the ultimate embodiment of modernism/modernity, to understand this claim I will first give a general outline of his life and after that I will try to clarify this statement.

The controversial mage Crowley was born in 1875 as the son of a preacher in the highly puritanical Plymouth Brethren sect. After his father passed away he inherited a large amount of money which he used to travel the world, work on his writings and climb mountains. From an early age Crowley was fascinated by poetry and paganism. The first time he came into contact with the magic was in 1898 when he was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was a combination of Hermeticism, Freemasonry, Rosacrucianism, Kabbalah and other esoteric traditions.

He became a controversial figure mainly because of his “Magick” rituals, which roughly put, is performing sexual acts in ritual settings. “Rejecting the morality of his Christian youth, Crowley set out to overturn what he saw as the oppressive, hypocritical attitudes of Victorian England, by identifying sex as the most central aspect of the human being and the most profound source of magical power. The popular press, of course took no end of delight in sensationalizing Crowley’s promiscuity, which was described in elaborate, often hilarious detail throughout the newspapers of the day.” (Urban, page 11). Besides performing Sodomy there were also rumors of him performing beastiality. His main goal of these rituals were transgression, breaking the boundaries, and through that transcending to a higher self and getting more magical power.

As Urban explains: “I would suggest that Crowley’s sexual magic is a striking illustration of what Georges Bataille calls the power of transgression, which is a central aspect of eroticism, religious ritual and mystical experience alike. As Bataille suggests, transgression is not a matter of simple hedonism or unrestrained sexual license. Rather, it’s power lies in the dialectic or play between taboo and transgression, sanctity and sacrilege, through which one systematically constructs and then oversteps all laws. In estatic mystical experience or religious rites, one must first create an aura of purity before one can defile it with violence and the overturning of law.” (Rowe, page 13/14)

These practices of magical sex or Magick started around 1899. He came in contact with Eastern spiritual traditions, and also likely Indian Tantra, as he soon after starting to have Magick rituals with his partner Rose Kelly. 

Crowley’s saw himself as a new kind of Jezus. A Messias who would bring upon a new Utopian world. In 1904 Crowley received his first great revelation
“and the knowledge that he was to be the herald of a new era in human history. According to Crowley’s own account, his guardian angel, Aiwass appeared to him and dictated the Book of the Law (Liber Legis). His most famous work, the Book of the law announces the dawn of a third aeon of mankind: the first aeon was that of the Goddess Isis, centered around matriarchy and the worship of the Great Mother; the second aeon was that of Osiris, during which the patriarchal religions of suffering and death –i.e., Judaism and Christianity – rose to power. Finally with the revelation of the Book of the Law, a new aeon of the son, Horus, was born. “In this aeon the emphasis is on the self or will, not on anything external such as gods or priests.” (page 9/10)


In the film Lucifer Rising, Anger actually calls upon this new aeon of Horus. As Isis and Osiris are summoning their child to rise again, Lucifer in this case is actually Horus. 

In 1920-1922 He founded his own sect called the Abbey of Thelma in Cefalu, Sicily. In this community people were allowed to react on their impulses and desire for sex, drugs and physical excess as they wished. ‘Do what thou will’ was the philosophy.

Crowly slowly went down the spiral from drug addiction and wrote and published the autobiographical book ‘Diary of a Drug friend’ to cover the expenses of his drug abuse. 

To shortly conclude to his lifestory. Crowley was a man who embodied the ‘Faustian’ spirit and therefore could be seen as the manifestation in person himself of modernism. With big dreams and ideals and the believe of progress and a new utopian world, but ending in misery and confusion.

(note to self: describe in more clarity on Crowley's practises/philosophy and link this to Anger's work, also more description of Anger's actual work)

Conclusion:

Bibliography:
Brook, V (2006), Puce Modern Moment: Camp, Postmodernism, and the films of Kenneth Anger, University of Illinois Press
Neiman, C (1980), An introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren, the MIT Press
Rowe, C (1974), Illuminating Lucifer, University of California Press
Urban, H.B. (2004), The Beast with Two Backs, Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity, University of California Press


Other sources:
Nicolas Winding Refn in conversation with Kenneth Anger Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h957MkWxaEU&t=941s