Illuminating Lucifer (Carel Rowe)

Illuminating Lucifer - Carel Rowe
Film Quarterly, vol. 27, No. 4 (summer, 19734). pp. 24–33
University of California Press

Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger are seen as the two most important names in the development of the New American Cinema. Both could be considered forerunners of Brakhage, Harrington, and Markopoulus. 

Carel Row suggests in this article that “Recent critical work attempting to draw parallels between the films of Derek and Anger through their mutual preoccupation with mystical ritual is misleading.” Deren was concerned with occultism as a classicist, interested in recombining its ritual orders within a system. Anger, a romanticist, sees occultism as a source of hermetic knowledge.


Deren was interested in in the occult as a system for depicting an interior state. She moved away from the surrealist psychodrama and developed a fascination for combining elements of a given ritual to structure the narrative material.

“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.”

Anger’s use of ritual on the other hand is quit different. He analyses different kind of myths, religions and rituals and mixes and matches these up in his films. Examples: Scorpio Rising (1964)and Inauguration of the pleasure Dome (1954–1960).


Not a surrealist who puts blind faith in his own dream images and trusts his dreams to convey an “uncommon unconscious,” Anger works predominately in archetypal symbols.


Anger’s interest in the occult came from the writings of Aleister Crowley, who was nicknamed “the Oscar Wilde of Magick”. The key philosophy of Crowley can be described as “Thou as thou wilt”.
Anger creates his own frame of reference which is an extension of the video and teachings of Aleister Crowley.

Anger as prestidigitator (=someone who performs magic/tricks) parallels Melies: a magician making transformations as well as reconstructions of reality.


Some bulletpoints:
- a collection of his films he calls “The magick Lantern Cycle”

- his films are “a search for light and enlightenment” (according to himself).

- Lucifer = Venus the morning star (in Lucifer Rising)

- Works predominately in archetypal symbol

- He sees glyphs, hieroglyphs, sigils, pictographs, billboards, and especially tattoos “magical marks on the wall.”

- Crowley invented “Magick” which is the performance of ritual which seeks to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel (the aspirant’s higher self), an idea adopted from medieval magus Abra-Melin

- “His films are evocations or invocations, attempting to conjure primal forces which, once visually released, are designed to have the effect of “casting a spell” on the audience.The Magick in the film is related to the Magickal effect of the film on the audience.”