Second essay draft 2nd trimester: Kenneth Anger and the occult

The occult, in Kenneth Angers films

 [not yet finished]

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. Writings about his work mostly focus on his fascination of the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ (camp), the depiction of gay male sexuality, and can be seen as an early form of music video. 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, but as this draft is already exceeding the 1500 word limit, I will leave this out. 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.




Early movies
Both Anger and Maya Deren were seen as the forerunners of a generation of visionary filmmakers like Brakhage, Harrington Markopoulos, etc. Often an analogy is made between the work of Anger and Deren. In their early works there are indeed parallels that can be drawn. Fireworks (1947), At Land (1944), and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) can all be seen as psychodrama, which is “a genre of American avant-garde film in which the filmmakers dramatize disturbed states of consciousness” (McDonald, p. 50). As Anger explains in a conversation with Nicolas Winding (source: youtube, see bibliography), the idea of Fireworks came to him after a dream occurred which was based on him witnessing sailors hunting down Mexican kids in downtown L.A. and beating them up. Juggling between an erotic dream and a nightmare, Fireworks displays a tension following one’s gay desire and the risk of violence that went with it at the time, after all homosexuality was illegal in America in 1947. As McDonald mentions: “Fireworks represents the impossibility of denying gay desire, even in a repressive antigay society.” (McDonald p.52).

So in short the representation of inner conflict shown in Fireworks is the ideal showcase of a psychodrama and in that sense the comparison between Anger and Deren makes sense. Later on both artist get interested in rituals and the occult and here we will see that comparison based on the use of ritual is not a valid one.

The occult and use of ritual


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). She continues later 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 ..). This was not true for Fireworks but there is indeed a difference between the two artists use of ritual in their films. Deren was concerned with occultism as a classicist, so the use of ritual in this sense had to look real, and was interested in recombining its ritual orders within a system.

“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… )

So Rowe here classifies Maya Deren as a forerunner of structuralist and also a classicist. 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 …). 


To be more precise, Anger describes his movie making like casting a spell. A major influence on Anger’s work came from Aleister Crowley’s invention of ‘magick’, which is the “[…]the performance of ritual which seeks to invoke The Holy Guardian Angel (the aspirant’s higher self)[…]” (Rowe, p.27). He calls Magick his lifework and cinematography therefore his Magickal weapon. He names his collection of films ‘The Magick Lantern Cycle’. The goal of his films was not only to invoke a higher self but also to cast a spell on the audience.

He attempts to do this by following a system of correspondences which establishes connections between certain colors, planets, plants, smells, etc., which are combined with talismans and other occult symbolisms. To give an illustration of such a chart I included one taken from the text “Aleister Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis” written by J.F. Brown.


 Magick, Thalema and "the wickedest man of the world"


To understand what Magick is and by what means this is visible in Anger’s work we first have to look at it’s creator, Aleister Crowley. The controversial mage 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 pursuit one of his hobbies; mountain climbing. From an early age Crowley was fascinated by poetry and paganism.

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." Urban argues that Crowley could be considered the ultimate embodiment of modernism/modernity. He therefore hopes “to show that Crowley is by no means the arch-enemy of modern Western civilization; on the contrary, he is in many respects the epitome of Western modernity[…] (Urban, P.08)
,br> He gained this notoriety when he first came into contact with 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.

“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).

The practices of magical sex or Magick started around 1899. After being in contact with Eastern spiritual traditions, and also likely Indian Tantra, he soon started Magick rituals with his partner Rose Kelly. Sex magic is based on the belief that the most powerful moment of human existence is the orgasm. The logic behind this is as follows: “For if ordinary, natural, undirected sexual intercourse can give birth to a new living being – a fairly miraculous thing in itself – then it is not terribly difficult to imagine that ritualized, intentional, willfully directed intercourse might give birth to effects of a supernatural, magical, divine (or demonic) character” (Urban, p.6). 
He saw this ‘unnatural’ sexual magic as an essential component for his vision of a new era in human history. Crowley’s saw himself as a Messiah who would bring upon a new Utopian world. This Messianic delusion came in existence when Crowley in 1904 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.” (Urban, page 9/10)


In The Book of Law the Thelema ideology is drawn out, of which the key point is to “do as thou wilt”. It appropriated a number of deities from ancient Egyptian religion. It also introduces the above mentioned ‘Third Aeon’ or the Aquarian Age/the Age of Horus.

Crowley’s life ended up with him being a penniless heroine addict, bored and disillusioned. So in that sense 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 endless progress and a new utopian world, but eventually ending in misery and confusion, like WW2.