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The FIR Vault

LOOK BACK WITH KENNETH ANGER

By Roy Frumkes • Nov 6th, 2008 • Pages: 1 2 3 4

Kenneth Anger with Inspector (Rudy Vallee's last dog). Photo courtsey of Photofest

Independent filmmakers work in many forms: features, short subjects, animation, documentaries, and experimental films. And the names of the legends in the field have persisted through the decades to remind us of the wilder creative forces holding court outside the gilded gates of Hollywood. John Cassavetes, Kenneth Anger, Frederic Wiseman, George Romero, John and Faith Hubley – gifted, nontraditional visionaries without whose work the substance of American cinema would he a dull, near-consistent, currency green.

All of the above names made their indelible mark on me, and on my peers. But perhaps none affected me more than Kenneth Anger, when one day in October 1967, I picked up a copy of the Village Voice and stumbled across his full-page obituary. At first I was shocked, then puzzled. The dates didn’t seem to jive. Slowly I pieced together that the obit had been placed by the filmmaker himself. Asking around, I was told that the negative of his latest film – LUCIFER RISING – a years-long work of passion and angst, which he’d been carrying around on the back of his motorcycle, had been stolen and destroyed by members of the Hells Angels. Utterly distraught, he had published his eulogy and left the country for good.

Mind you, this was purely unsubstantiated word of mouth, but it was all I had to go on. Many times I recounted it, after screenings of SCORPIO RISING or others of Anger’s experimental works, long after he’d returned to the independent scene with a reworking of the destroyed LUCIFER RISING – and other personal pieces, as well as the notorious Hollywood Babylon books.

Such are the rewards of being a film magazine editor. In 1994,1 pursued Anger for the Cult Film Issue of Perfect Vision Magazine, to no avail. I would have done as well to fling a bottle into the sea. Two years passed, and I was now Editor-in-Chief of FIR, thinking about a future issue on the Independent scene. Thirty years had elapsed since I’d read that obit in the Voice. I was determined to try again, and with the help of Ray Schnitzer, an old friend of Anger’s, I finally established contact.

Films In Review: I’m assuming from what I know about your career that you consciously chose your path rather than go the Hollywood route.

Kenneth Anger: When I graduated from Beverly Hills High School I could have started out at Fox, which was the studio near where I lived. In the mailroom or whatever. But I went to Europe instead. I was offered a job by Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise. And I was in Paris from the Spring of 1950 until 1962. They were wonderful years because I was able to meet filmmakers, and you can imagine the people who were still around. I got to know Jean Cocteau quite well. I lived on the Ile St. Louis. And every morning, if I cared to go out early, I’d see Bresson walking his dog. I got to know Marcel Carne. Later on I met Truffaut and people like that when they were critics-when directing was just a gleam in their eye.

FIR: You were making films from the early ’40s. Were you encountering any opposition to your work before you went to Paris?

KA: No, because very few people saw my films. When they were shown, I had the backing of my grandmother. She bought my 16mm camera for me as a birthday present. It was a Bell and Howell, a good, sturdy camera, and I made some of my early films with it, such as FIREWORKS [1947], when I was 17.

FIR: When I was at Tulane University, I was cochairman of the Film Society there, and we put together an evening of eight experimental shorts including UN CHIEN ANDALOU, MOONBIRD, and the RITES OF SPRING sequence from Fantasia. A faculty committee demanded to screen the films, and the one they refused to allow to be screened was FIREWORKS.

KA: What year was that?

FIR: 1963.

KA: That’s rather retro.

FIR: I had someone get up in front of the audience and announce that Fireworks would not be shown, then I locked myself in the projection booth and showed it anyway and got in trouble over it.

KA: That’s very independent minded of you, but I’m surprised that at such a late date, even in the South, it could cause such a commotion. It was scheduled at the Coronet Theater when there was a film society there run by the notorious Raymond Rohauer, who later became known as a film pirate extraordinaire. He announced it was in the program and then he chickened out and cancelled it. But I personally never had any run-ins over it.

FIR: FIREWORKS is an awfully knowledgeable and controlled film to have made at 17

KA: It’s much easier to do things at that age if you know what you want to do. I was far from naive cinematically. I had just the minimum of what I needed to do it: I had enough raw stock and I had the camera and I had friends who were willing to help me who had their own costumes because they were actually training to be cameramen for the US Navy. They had the summer uniforms so I said, “Come over in your whites and we’ll do the scene,” and it was done in one weekend. But thought went into it. I knew I couldn’t afford to do 10 takes of something. I had to do it in one or two.

Anger in a SCORPIO RISING production sill

FIR: What films were you influenced by at that time?

KA: I had seen BLOOD OF A POET at the Esquire Theater in L.A. a couple of years before I made FIREWORKS. We had the Gallery of Modern Art, run by Clara Grossman, a tiny gallery up on Hollywood Boulevard. She had a film series every Friday. The prints came from the Museum of Modern Art’s circulating film library. The projector came from the Department of Cinema at USC. It was held in a courtyard so small that we had to put the projector outside and project through the open doors. About 20 people could watch. And if it rained, I had to hold an umbrella over the projector.

At that time, 16mm prints were much better. There’s been a deterioration of 16mm, and it’s hard to get a good black-and-white print anymore. But at that time MoMA had excellent 16mm prints, like all the classic Russian films. We ran those, and the French avante garde, with emphasis on silent films. And we had a piano playing along with them. So that was my education to films that weren’t Hollywood.

I remember my grandmother took me to the first film I saw, and I have a very clear memory of it. It was an outdoor screening at the Pacific Palisades. She thought she was taking me to a documentary on Mexico. But what she took me to was the Sal Lesser film, THUNDER OVER MEXICO, cut from Eisenstein’s QUE VIVA MEXICO. And as a child I was riveted by the scene when the peasants are buried in the earth and the horsemen run through and kill them. Even though it wasn’t cut by Eisenstein, the images are so powerful. And that whole episode is practically intact.

FIR: FIREWORKS won awards.

KA: It was made in ’47, and in ’49, just on a whim, I sent it to a film festival in France called the Festival du Film Maudit, which means the festival of damned film. I think I read it in the trades because it wouldn’t have been the kind of thing that would have been reported in the LA Times. I air mailed it to Biarritz, France. Europe was in a chaotic, dark state. Rationing and things were still going on. So I figured I’d never see the film again, and I was amazed when Cocteau, who was on the jury, awarded it the prize of Film Poetique. And luckily I’d studied French in Beverly Hills High School and had a rudimentary acquaintance with the language. There was a personal note from Cocteau saying he loved it, and quotes that I’ve used ever since.

FIR: What was Cocteau like?

KA: He was absolutely charming. But the French are very chauvinist about their language. In other words, they do not speak English. Either you speak French, or forget it. So it was like being dunked into French culture immediately. They would talk and if you sort of nodded and said “Evidement,” well, that meant that you understood, that it was obvious. So I listened and picked up all their verbal cliches.

Cocteau invited me to see his apartment in the Palais Royale, which was a tiny little room with walls of red vel- vet and blackboards where he did chalk reminders of what he was to do that day-he used little drawings. It was charming, and I’ve never seen photographs of it.

The first people I stayed with were friends of mine from Columbia Pictures who had been in Jack Cole’s dance company. They’d been the dancers in all the Rita Hayworth musicals. And they, in protest of the beginning of the blacklist period, said “We’re not going to answer any questions?” Cause these were guys in their 20s who in the Depression years in New York City, where most of them were from, might have belonged to some kind of youth organization, you know. And membership in these things was now being questioned like it was subversive. So they just quit Columbia and they got an offer to dance in the leading night club of Paris. The owner of the Lido had seen their numbers with Rita Hayworth and said, “If you can do something like that in our nightclub, it’ll be a smash.” And it was. They were headliners there for two years. So they said, “Anytime you want to come over, you can always stay with us, Ken.” And the prospect of free lodging in Paris was quite an incentive.

When Henri Langlois knew that I was arriving he arranged a screening at Cinematheque of the few films that I had made. And this bunch of celebrities came to meet me – Jean Genet, Cocteau, Marais… I couldn’t believe that such people would turn out to meet this unknown kid from California who made this little 15-minute film. I soon got used to it and had a delightful time because the relationship with the Cinematheque lasted until Henri Langlois died, which was in the ’70s. I actually worked as his personal assistant for my 12 years in Paris.

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