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

Sorry not yet finished with the draft

The occult, Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley

Kenneth Anger born in 1927 is an American underground experimental filmmaker. He made around 40 works. His films are a mixture of surrealism, camp, homoeroticism and the occult. In this essay I would like to dive deeper into his world and the content of his film by analyzing it’s occult side (and perhaps also the camp side). By this I hope to get a better understanding of his work in general. And therefore start my research into avant-garde filmmaking and its practices.

Both Anger and Maya Deren were seen as the forerunners of a generation of visionary filmmakers like Brakhage, Harrington, Markopoulos etc. But 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 I also feel that the link between The first films of both artist do parallel each other. In a conversation with Nicolas Winding (source: youtube), Anger explains that his film Fireworks was based on a dream he had after seeing sailors fighting on the street. Rowe in her analysis claims: “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.” (Rowe, page ..). Here she overlooks, or does not mention, the formal, symbolic and ‘dream inspired’ similarities of Fireworks, At Land, and Meshes of the Afternoon. 
 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, 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… )


Anger on the contrary is a romanticist, and sees occultism as a source of hermetic knowledge. “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 Thelma 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”.

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 fresh approach to Crowley, by placing him within contemporary debates about modernism and postmodernism.

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.

“Crowley’s ultimate goal was one of transgression on every level – to explode the boundaries of all morality and conventional models of sexuality in order to achieve an intense experience of superhuman liberation.” (Urban, page 8).