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The FIR Vault

LOOK BACK WITH KENNETH ANGER

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

From INAGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME. Photo courtsey of Photofest.

FIR: How was it, an American, being his assistant?

KA: Basically it was hard work because Henri was a first-class eccentric, though he fed me very well. He got to be very heavy, like Orson Welles. We ate in the best restaurants where, because Cinematheque was a government institution, the restaurants owners in France had an attitude towards culture. “This is a famous artist” or, “This is a famous cultural institution, so of course you can run up a bill here?’ And sometimes his bill wouldn’t be paid for three years. It would actually come up into the millions because he would sometimes be entertaining 12 people for lunch, including Hitchcock and Mrs. Hitchcock. And the restaurant owners were impressed to see these famous people.

FIR: I’ve just gone from admiring you to envying you.

KA: I think back to those meals. The cuisine was classic French, with all the rich cream sauces…

At an exhibit, he would work day and night for months. He would mix all the colors himself. And often he’d have a whole wall painted, a 20-by-30-foot wall would be painted a shade of mauve and then he’d say, “No, it’s wrong.” And he’d completely repaint it. The exhibit would get done minutes before the Ministry of Culture and everyone would be there. Then we’d have this frenzy to get Langlois shaved, bathed, and sort of shoehorned into his tuxedo. If only someone had been able to make a movie of what was going on. And he would look quite presentable except for the bags under his eyes. He wouldn’t have slept for about two months. But that’s the way he liked to work. He was an anarchist and he would go on these creative binges. It wasn’t drugs or anything like that. It was just burning up adrenaline. He died young, of course. He was about 60. I consider that young today. He was very controversial, and the Ministry of Culture tried to fire him because his finances were what you might call impressionistic. In no other country but France would you have the government putting up with this kind of mad genius.

He had lots of enemies, too. People that were jealous or who felt that he was just a scoundrel. His methods were so unconventional. But he literally loved film. He was sitting on this time bomb. Nitrates were everywhere. He said “Well you have to love nitrate and then it’ll love you back.” He said “The thing is, it has to breath.” And he was technically right; when they just sit on the shelf and no one opens the cans for years, gasses will build up. If you put an old silent film on rewind and just air it, it helps to get the gas out of the can and aerate the film.

I helped him do this. We had Jean Renoir’s first film, LA FILLE DE L’EAU (THE GIRL OF THE WATER) and it was starting to turn sticky, which is one of the signs of deterioration. It had been tinted in sort of pale green and yellow tones, and the chemicals were starting to go. And he said, “No, no. We’re not going to throw it away. We’re going to dry it out.” He had it up on clothespins all over the Cinematheque, and it was true, the stickiness subsided enough so that it could actually be run through a projector.

Of course, later on he had a couple of horrendous fires. But this was because hundreds of nitrate films were piled up on a very hot summer day in the ’50s in the court to be picked up and taken to San Paulo, Brazil for a retrospective of French films, and the delivery van was late, so Henri and the rest of us went to lunch about a block away. The cans were left sitting there under a glass porte cochere. The noon sun shining through that glass onto the metal film cans resulted in a tremendous explosion. Hundreds of unique prints were destroyed, including the only print in the world of the second part of WEDDING MARCH HONEYMOON. The fire went up 75 feet in the air, a huge column of flame, and Langlois rushed back, but there was no way of saving them. He ran upstairs, where he had the original costumes from IVAN THE TERRIBLE that had been given him by the Russians. They were in glass cases, and with his bare hands he broke the glass to reach in and save them. He succeeded, but they were covered in his own blood.

Anger at rest amidst his memorabilia. Photo courtsey of Photofest.

FIR: Do you feel that your films are adequately preserved?

KA: Well, in 1993 one of my films – EAUX D’ARTIFICE, shot in the Tivoli Gardens-was selected by the Library of Congress as one of the only two 16mm avante garde films to qualify for their preservation program. The other 16mm films on the list were big blockbuster features like IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and THE GODFATHER. The other avante garde film was Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.

This prompted me to look at my 16mm camera original. It had been developed and washed in a lab in Rome, and apparently they didn’t rinse it enough to get the hypo off, and it had begun to fade in spots, similar to what happens with a still photograph it if hasn’t been adequately rinsed: they turn brown or yellow. I was chilled to realize that I wouldn’t have looked at it except for the Library of Congress’s motivation.

FIR: What shape is SCORPIO RISING in?

KA: That was filmed on reversal Ectachrome and it’s in good shape. But I’m still concerned about the original on EAUX D’ARTIFICE. I keep them in a refrigerated lab vault in Mamaroneck, New York, where the low temperature slows down whatever happens. But my films shot on Kodachrome and Ectachrome, and Kodachrome commercial, on which I shot INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME, show absolutely no sign of fading, and I think I’m extremely lucky. Sixteen mm Kodachrome color is one of the most stable emulsions. It’s almost as good as the old three-strip Technicolor. But 16mm has problems just like 35mm does and some of my films are now half a century old. Shrinkage and brittleness are two of the problems.

At this point there was an interruption from someone. Anger excused himself and while he was away from the phone, I started thinking about LUCIFER RISING, and about the theft of the negative 30 years before.

KA: Sorry. But overnight the swimming pool has emptied. It was almost like a flying saucer had come down to have a drink. Luckily it isn’t the middle of summer. Often in the morning I just go out and jump in the pool when I wake up, and if I’d taken a flying leap and the pool had been empty…

FIR: Speaking of flying saucers, in LUCIFER RISING…

KA: I have seen, and very carefully noted, the conditions of several unidentified flying objects. I’ve never had a close encounter of the third kind, but I’ve certainly had a close encounter of the second kind: a close view. In 1967, in San Francisco, I saw a glowing disc come out over the Pacific at night. I was with a friend, so it wasn’t like I was having a hallucination, and we weren’t smoking pot or anything. It was completely silent. No vibration or sound of any kind, and yet it was close enough to see flashing colors inside a kind of room or cockpit. Without discussing it, I told my friend to write down what he saw, and then we compared notes. And we’d seen basically the same thing.

I had another in the early ’70s on a train in England.

This silver thing hovering quite close. And what annoys me is that when you read a whodunit you want to know in the last chapter who did it. But I don’t think there will ever be an answer. Certainly not in my lifetime. I can see the way it’s going, and it’s not getting any closer to being answered.

I was angry with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. It had some impressive effects in it, but the fact that Spielberg would do things like having the craft make a loud humming noise and shake everything to pieces whereas in real life what is so magical and mysterious about these things is that they’re totally silent-much more thrilling than sounding like a tremendous powerhouse of machinery.

FIR: You showed a UFO in your remake of LUCIFER RISING. But your films aren’t Ray Harryhausen films, so clearly something else is going on there.

KA: I’d been in Egypt five times before I made LUCIFER RISING. The first time was in 1950 when Cocteau gave me a letter to deliver to a friend of his, one of the top Egyptologists. The partner of this archaeologist had been killed, leaving him desolate. They had been working together for 25 years. His name was Baron de Lubitz, and he was the founder of The School of Symbolic Egyptology, a theory maintaining that every inch of everything the Egyptians ever built was for symbolic reasons. Cocteau found this absolutely fascinating, and I believed it, too.

Anyway, there’s a link between the solar disc, which is very important in the cosmology of ancient Egypt, and the flying saucer. In their stories, the gods are transported on discs. I had a sighting in Egypt quite similar to the one that I re-created in LUCIFER RISING. The special effect of the saucer was done for me by Wally Veevers.

FIR: Really? Who worked on 2001…

KA: I described what I needed, and he said, “Well, sure. I have the rostrum and I’ll just do it for you in my spare time.” He’d been working for Kubrick. It didn’t take a great deal of his time, and he was happy to do it for me. And believe me, it was pushing the limits of 16mm. To get a rock-steady image is considerably more difficult than on 35mm because you only have one sprocket per image. I was only lucky enough to make one film on 35mm RABBIT’S MOON.

FIR: This is the 30th anniversary of the theft of LUCIFER RISING which strikes me as an important moment in the history of experimental film in this country, and I would love to hear the truth about the event.

KA: I began LUCIFER in San Francisco, where I met Bobby Beausoleil. He was a teenager at the time and a guitarist in a psychedelic acid rock band called Love. He was of the astrological sign of Scorpio and I’m Scorpio rising. He had shoulder-length hair and a very charismatic character and a harem of girls, which is what gave him the nickname Cupid.

We seemed to hit it off well. One day he asked if he could take my van and go down to LA from San Francisco because he had a deal-something to do with his own band. I advanced him some cash and he disappeared with the van, and when he came back, he put these wrapped-up packages in my studio. Eventually I became suspicious and cut open a corner of a package with a razor blade, and there was a compressed kilo of grass, which he had scored somewhere down in southern California, or possibly Mexico, which placed me in jeopardy, not only because he was a minor, but if there was going to be any kind of bust or anything…

I was furious over this, and when he came back I said, “Look. You’ve betrayed me.” He was a very tricky character in my view, very much like the Indian Trickster in American Indian folklore. Anyway, I literally put him outside the door, but he had the keys to the van, and he took it. I said, “Well, we’ll worry about the car later.”

I went out to dinner a night or two later and he came back and took the film. It was enough for about an hour and a half feature; it was practically finished.

The van he stole from me finally expired on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, and the place where it stopped was right across the street from the Span Ranch. The Span and Iverson ranches are both movie locations, with a lot of recognizable boulders. They’ve been in dozens of westerns and serials. An interesting location, and a bit eerie. And, as a matter of fact, the Manson family, including Charlie, were holed up in the Span Ranch.

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