Except in a few cases, like when Sir Paul Getty was alive and he sponsored my Mickey Mouse film, I had very limited financial resources.
But WHERE’S THE IMAGINATION? Kenneth AngerĪNGER: Well, I had to tailor my dreams to fit my budgets. IT’S TOO BAD, BECAUSE the MONEY IS THERE. I DON’T SEE ANY GREAT DREAM MYSTICS who ARE PUSHING MAGICAL EFFECTS. KORINE: What if you had no budgetary limitations? What would you make? But my dreams are, like, big budget, and my movies are small budget. KORINE: Are there things that you’ve dreamed that have ended up in your films?ĪNGER: I wish. They’re mostly visual-oddly enough, I don’t have much dialogue in my dreams. But a few times a month, I’ll have a rather interesting dream. In other words, I don’t have some kind of loud, Technicolor dream every night. They do mean quite a lot to me, and they don’t happen all that often. KORINE: What about your dreams? Can you remember your dreams?ĪNGER: I try to remember them, and occasionally I’ll make a note or two in a notebook if it’s something extra interesting. I’ve been to that a few times, but basically, I’m a loner. There are some practitioners here who do something called the Gnostic Mass. I believe in Thelema, which is Crowley’s so-called religion. Do you practice any religion today?ĪNGER: I’m a Thelemite. Is there any kind of crossover between them? What was the energy that connected the two of them, for you?ĪNGER: Well, I’m sorry, I really can’t answer that. KORINE: The occult and old Hollywood have played a big part in your work. But basically Hollywood has lost its focus as a film center. KORINE: How do you think California has changed since you were young?ĪNGER: Well, everything is constantly evolving and changing. But I have a lot of friends who are editors, and there are a lot of technical things going on here that are interesting. I don’t particularly care for any of the current crop of directors. I don’t particularly care for any of the current crop of actors. I hate to say that, but the past was much more fascinating.
KORINE: Do you feel like there’s any type of magic to Los Angeles still? Is it as interesting as old Hollywood?ĪNGER: Uh, no. So that doesn’t count.ĪNGER: I live right in the center of Hollywood. KORINE: Is there anything you say at night before you go to bed?ĪNGER: I’m usually up all night. It’s an Crowley ritual, where you say, “Hail, hail!” to the sun. KORINE: What’s the greeting of the sun like?ĪNGER: Oh, it’s just a mental thing. KORINE: What’s a typical day for you now?ĪNGER: I greet the sun in the morning, because that’s part of my religion, and then I proceed with the day. HARMONY KORINE: Hi, Kenneth! How’s it going? We thought they should, so in April, Korine called Anger from his home in Nashville to discover that his hero is still working outside of the mainstream, still a scabrous critic of Hollywood, and still speculating about that Malaysia Airlines flight. Painter and filmmaker-and something of a hell-raiser himself-Harmony Korine has long appreciated the work and legend of Anger, but the two have never really had the chance to speak. Inside the industry, he’s never found a place to rest-he has Lucifer tatted on his chest. He has been famously obscene (and charged as such for Fireworks in California), happily hallucinogenic (his Invocation of My Demon Brother from 1969 was famously evocative of an acid trip), and quite consciously provocative (see all).
Anger is the godfather of homoerotic cinema, having made his pioneering Fireworks in 1947. Over the course of his multivalent career, Anger has worked with and befriended such artists as Marianne Faithfull (a collaborator on Lucifer Rising), the surrealist Jean Cocteau, guitar god Jimmy Page, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and Tennessee Williams, as well as fellow Thelemite Marjorie Cameron-star of Pleasure Dome and onetime wife of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder Jack Parsons. And he is also the most famous living practitioner of Thelema-the ritual-based doctrine dictated to Aleister Crowley by the spiritual messenger Aiwass. His film and video works are in the permanent collections of various museums of modern art. But his salacious narrative history of the industry, Hollywood Babylon, originally published in 1960, is also kitsch-famous, a kind of gossip gospel in the land of holy celebrity. The 87-year-old native Angeleno is indeed the writer and director of the surrealist shorts Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), and Lucifer Rising (1970-81)-some of the wildest and most profoundly influential experimental films of the last century. To describe Kenneth Anger as a “cult filmmaker” seems requisite but incomplete. MY DREAMS ARE, LIKE, BIG BUDGET, AND MY MOVIES ARE SMALL BUDGET.
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