Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle

Screening: Friday, August 25, at 7 pm

“Few artists today have achieved the legendary status, notorious celebrity, and sublime mastery of the cinema as Kenneth Anger, one of the greatest virtuoso filmmakers to emerge from the postwar American experimental film movement. Fueled by Anger’s polymath imagination, his visually dazzling films draw from an incredible range of sources – classical Hollywood, Méliès, Coleridge, Crowley – to create an intoxicating world entirely of their own, a shimmering, dangerous realm ruled by cruel and beautiful demons, goddesses, harlequins and princes. The hypnotic power and intensity of Anger’s films is simply astonishing, with his inspired use of color, superimposition, and exquisite framing rendering each frame a breathtaking work of art. Of equal importance is his inventive use of popular, classical, and composed music to add ironic counterpoint and swelling operatic drama to the fables and rituals enacted within his films. Undaunted by his constant struggle to secure support for his increasingly ambitious projects, Anger brilliantly reworked his finished films, condensing and intensifying their imagery and structure… Over time he subtly reworked his films into the sequence that he would later name his Magick Lantern Cycle, using the preferred spelling of his spiritual mentor Aleister Crowley, and placing at its center his most celebrated work, Scorpio Rising, both a brilliant documentary of a Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang and a profound meditation on the dark intermingling of fascism, religion, and popular culture. Anger’s subsequent films pushed the ritualistic aspects of his cinema to a further extreme following his increased engagement with Satanist practices and a group of practitioners that included Bobby Beausoleil, a member of the Manson Family who appeared prominently in Evocation of My Demon Brother shortly before being sentenced to life imprisonment for murder – he later composed the haunting score for Lucifer Rising from his prison cell.”

Anger Rising (1927-2023)