2023-05-24 18:58:54
If the ‘cult author’ label wasn’t coined for him, it looks like it. Kenneth Anger He has passed away at the age of 96. His cinematographic work never came out of the strictest ‘underground’, but his influence is present in different ways in directors such as John Waters and David Lynch. The two volumes of ‘Hollywood, Babylonia‘, bible of the unspeakable secrets of the Mecca of cinema when nobody put their noses in there, did surface after not a few vicissitudes and is the basis of the recent film ‘Babylon’, by Damien Chazelle.
Kenneth Anger (baptismal name Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer) was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1927. His filmography consists of only short films, about 40, of which ‘Fireworks’ (1947) was the first to attract attention. The film cost him to be prosecuted for obscenity. “This movie is all I have to say about being 17, the United States Navy, American Christmas and the 4th of July,” said Anger.
Homoeroticism, fetishism, surrealism and occultism (he was fascinated by Aleister Crowley) plow through his work. ‘Scorpio rising’ (1963), his most ‘popular’ film, concentrates all these isms and focuses them on biker subculture.
The first volume of “Hollywood, Babylon” was published in 1959 in France and in 1965 in the United States, only to be banned for almost a decade. The book was accused of being sensationalist and a liar, but in any case it left its mark on the popular imagination. Not to mention ‘Mulholland drive’, from David Lynch. The work of James Elroy seems to agree with him, if not in detail then in the full image.
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