Experimental Stories is a program dedicated to filmmakers who have made avant-garde cinema history: the 18th edition of Archivio Aperto pays tribute to the great filmmaker Kenneth Anger, a pioneer of experimental cinema, with a retrospective of 12 films, screened on film and partly in digital format.
Curated by Cecilia Ermini
New York, March 21, 1966, Spring Equinox. For the event, Kenneth Anger prepares a written program for a cycle of screening of some of his films – such as Kustom Kar Kommandos, Fireworks, Eaux d’Artifice and Scorpio Rising – titled Magick Lantern Cycle in the cinema of Jonas Mekas’ Filmmakers’s Coop. The booklet includes written pieces, frames from his films and a few notes in which Anger suggests the best moment to eat the cubes of LSD. – the booklet, some sort of character sheet, compiled by Anger, in which he disclosed his zodiac sign, his hobbies, his religion, and, most important, his heroes: Flash Gordon, the poet Lautrémont, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, occultist Aleister Crowley and George Méliès. And it’s precisely from the pioneer of movie theatres that we can – and must – start to try and define the great complexity of a filmmaker such as Anger. Méliès, in fact, has been the forefather of both experimental and Hollywood cinema. An apparently impossible meeting point that perfectly encapsulates the thrumming tension of Anger’s cinema. Classicism and experimentation, ordinary and extraordinary, formal precision and kitsch.
Rabbit’s Moon was Anger’s first movie, shot in Paris with 35mm in 1950. It was his own very personal tribute to Méliès. Filmed in a sound stage, the blue tinted short film is an oneiric reinterpretation of the Commedia dell’Arte. The protagonists are Pierrot and Harlequin, same as Méliès’s 1903 short, La lanterne magique. Therefore, a tribute to a kind of cinema that pays homage to the world of pre-cinema. That is, to its direct cinematic ancestor, The Magic Lantern. The very same that will inspire the title Magick Lantern Cycle – which includes most of Anger’s films. That additional “k” alludes to another fundamental element of Anger’s poetry. In fact, Magick is the title of Aleister Crowley’s (perhaps Anger’s most prominent “hero”) most famous work, written in 1929. Thus, in Anger’s cinema European surrealism, complex narrative symbology and mystical-esoteric doctrines coexist. Elements that become, through their recurrence, fixed key points of unmistakable poetry and at the same time will contribute to shape collective imagination and most of the experimental cinema of the twentieth century.
Kenneth Anger’s work also represents a radical critique of Hollywood, by evoking (and often quoting) pop icons in occult settings and depicting youth counterculture within a framework of violence and eroticism. Anger does not employ a narrative style; he explores lyrically themes of ritual transformation and transfiguration. His films are characterized by a baroque splendor, which derives from the sensuality of his colors and his opulent imagery. Born in 1930 in Santa Monica, California, Kenneth Anger grew up immersed in the entertainment industry: he was a child actor and played the role of the changeling prince in 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His fascination with Hollywood’s dark side led him to write two controversial books: Hollywood Babilonia in 1965 and its sequel in 1984. His revolutionary works constitute one of cinema’s most fascinating collection, which influenced entire generation of artists and filmmakers: from Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman to Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.
In collaboration with Cinedoc – Paris Film Coop.
