MAGICK LANTERN CYCLE: Kenneth Anger’s Queer Esoteric Saga
While his name may not be as famous as that of other LGBT filmmakers, Kenneth Anger is one of the most important directors of the 20th century for both gay representation and underground cinema. Born in 1927, he already showed a strong passion for creating short films as a child, making 16mm home movies in every which way he could. It was in 1947, as he was discovering his sexual identity, that he made the first film in what would end up being titled the Magick Lantern Cycle: Fireworks. This short captured the eroticism of uncovering one’s homosexuality juxtaposed with quintessential American imagery: 4th of July fireworks, Christmas trees on fire, and sailors in excellent shape.
Fireworks proved to be so controversial at that time, when homosexual acts were still considered illegal in the US, that Anger was arrested on obscenity charges, though later acquitted. This succession of events fully shaped him into the risk-taking filmmaker that he is today. All of his films (many of which were shot but never fully edited) are a celebration of queerness, at first something that needs to be kept disguised but later celebrated, portraying homosexuality in bolder and riskier ways than many other directors would. Living in an era where gay people had to hide their activities and were condemned by the Church and other institutions for being “evil” and “against nature”, Kenneth Anger embraced all of this rage and implemented it into his works.
A strong influence on Anger was Aleister Crowley, founder of the cult of Thelema. The three main statements that Crowley wrote down after an apparent encounter with Egyptian entity Aiwass in 1904 are: “do what thou wilt”, “love is the law, love under will”, and “every man and every woman is a star”. Anger converted to Thelema in his young years and ended up implementing many of its ideals in his works, starting with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. His longest film to date, it is an elaborate collection of lavish costumes and colourful sets meant to replicate a masquerade of deities, joining to bask in the pleasures of life.
It’s in 1964 that Anger would release what is arguably his greatest achievement and definitely his most influential work: Scorpio Rising. The film pushed the boundaries for many elements at the time, mainly the use of music: there is a strong contrast between the songs that play and the visuals on screen. It is downright cheeky, playing Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet while sensually moving the camera over a man getting dressed, or I Will Follow Him by Little Peggy March ringing loudly as the leader of a biker gang holds a blasphemous mass inside a church he just destroyed. This is the type of contradictory music that would move Stanley Kubrick in implementing Singin’ In The Rain during a scene of assault in A Clockwork Orange, or David Lynch transforming Love Letters into a song of violence rather than romance in Blue Velvet.
The film’s importance does not stop there. Many hot-button topics of the era are touched upon heavily here: the gang of homosexual bike riders (dressed similarly to Brando and his motorcycle club in The Wild One) are revealed to be neo-Nazis, indulging in gay orgies and desecrating churches. Anger intercuts footage from 1952’s The Last Journey to Jerusalem over the last portion of the short, almost directly linking the followers of Jesus with the followers of Scorpio (the leader of the bikers), which has implications of both fanaticism and homoeroticism. Needless to say, Scorpio Rising not only was highly controversial upon release, but it became one of the earliest proper cult classic films to be shown around the States at midnight screenings for multiple years.
Kenneth Anger doubled down with linking men’s obsessions with their cars to homosexuality in the short Kustom Kar Kommandos, full of lingering crotch shots and sensuous camerawork. The second to last film of the cycle, Invocation of My Demon Brother, was the by-product of Anger reinventing himself after meeting many celebrities from 1960s counterculture, including Mick Jagger, creating a mixture of esoteric images conjuring the Devil through a rock concert. It is notable for featuring an incredibly experimental and trippy score by Jagger himself, unlike anything he ever made before or after it.
All of his life’s work reached an apotheosis in 1972 with Lucifer Rising. If Scorpio Rising was a transgressive, pre-punk, rock, glorified music video, this was an operatic, ambitious, glorious culmination of Anger’s love for Thelema, occult rituals, and homosexuality. If being gay is “evil”, then only the Fallen Angel himself, Lucifer, can come to Earth to bring the dawn of an era of queerness, where everyone can be free to be who they are without fear of violence. Lucifer becomes a literal “light-bearer”, irradiating the planet with colour and love in a way that other close-minded religions never could.
Lucifer Rising truly is the fitting climax to a nine-films-long series. Everything started with anxiety and repression, as a young man is punished for his natural feelings and thoughts, needing to hide inside his own mind and dreams to find solace. Everything ends with grandiose spectacle, an orgy of life, where the return of pure evil is the only solution to have people be free in expressing their true beings. It is touching in a way that still does not sacrifice humour and LSD-inspired imagery.
Unfortunately, this would signal the end of Anger’s career for almost two decades: broke and with little respect from the Hollywood crowd, he was unable to secure financing for a sequel to Lucifer Rising, effectively finishing the unofficial Magick Lantern Cycle. The birth of VHS tapes helped him in becoming popular with a new generation of filmmakers and cinephiles, and he slowly started getting more recognition for his boundary-pushing representation of gay passion and his influence on cinema as a whole. He has now produced multiple short films with little to no budget, as he travels from film festivals to museum exhibitions of his work, enjoying the last years of his life knowing that his legacy will not be forgotten. It is a shame that he never got to fully achieve his vision for the Magick Lantern Cycle, but what he has made has forever left a mark on many a director and young people in accepting their sexual orientation, and that alone is better than any award.