The end of the long, legendary life of Kenneth Anger (1927-2023) last month brings a sombre, if long foreseen resolution to the peculiar state of tension in which the film maker always seemed to exist with his public. Few in the pantheon of American cinema’s mid-century underground made work of more consequence to popular culture than Anger, who rode the full pendulum swing of the 60s counterculture, and fused the romantic decadence of the European avant garde and the anarchic exuberance of postwar American youth culture into a unique and confrontational poetic signature. But eccentricity and anti-sociality plagued a personal life which – as auteur and artistic tyrant – Anger could or would not separate from his work. Creative triumphs were stalked by catastrophe off screen; recrimination, destitution, and death a persistent, buzzing cloud, as though brought down by one of the baleful gods conjured in the dazzling ritual spaces of his films.

He was born Kenneth Anglemeyer to a middle class family in Santa Monica, California. As a boy, his costume seamstress grandmother imprinted him with glamorous and sordid Hollywood gossip, and brought him to his first double feature: the Al Jolson picture The Singing Fool and Sol Lesser’s recut of Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!. Years later, Anger would cling to a disputed (and now finally disproved) claim that it was he, rather than Sheila Brown, who played the Changeling Child in Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), though to look at a production photo one might still momentarily believe. Like the superimpositions that populate his films, these thwarted dreams of stardom, and an arrest as a teenager for homosexuality, form a skeleton key to his artistic sensibility, one preoccupied with ritual pageantry, menaced eroticism, and a melancholic child’s eye for playthings great and small. Immersed in the demi-monde of Los Angeles, he was drawn to sadomasochism, and to a lifetime discipline in Thelema, the ‘sex-magick’ cult of Aleister Crowley. He made his first films (now lost) reborn under his self-baptised moniker: Anger.

His first major film, Fireworks (1947), restaged as psycho-drama a moment of violence he witnessed at the hands of Navy sailors during Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots. Significantly, his version sidesteps any racial dimension, transforming a mob attack into a rite of homosexual initiation and human sacrifice – with the filmmaker casting himself as ambivalent victim. Along with Maya Deren, Anger broke Buñuelian surrealism in America with a shift in subject position and intensity: the young gay cruiser’s desires are a threat, not just to his ego, but to his very bodily life. Ottorini Respighi’s late romantic tone poem Pines Of Rome sets the mood, its flourishes evoking another of Anger’s great early influences, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Fireworks’ obvious, though coyly disguised sexual content (a sailor pulls a strategically-placed Roman candle from his fly) landed the film maker the first of several obscenity charges, as well as the attention of sexologist Alfred Kinsey, future friend and patron.

Inspired by a bohemian Los Angeles costume party, Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) cast Anaïs Nin alongside Marjorie Cameron, the witchy Thelemite widow of rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Pleasure Dome’s outwardly occult motifs, delirious colours, and mandalian superimpositions make it a work of psychedelia avant la lettre. When Harry Partch objected to recordings of his being used in the film, Anger replaced them with Leoš Janáček’s tense and splendid Glagolitic Mass. Later, tinkering as he did with nearly all his films (“works in progress, until I die,” he told Richard Henderson in 2004 in The Wire 247), he tried Electric Light Orchestra’s album Eldorado (1974), revising self-consciously towards the reputation as pop-sound selector he would earn with his next, and most famous film.

Anger first encountered the subjects for Scorpio Rising (1963) on Coney Island while staying in a garret above the apartment of his New York City hosts, Marie Menken and William Maas. The leather-clad bikers, pulsing with amphetamines, preening over accessories and their overbuilt machines, made an ideal study for Anger’s further investigations into the paradox of masculinity on screen. Anger’s pose-and-flow montage is as sinuous and controlled as the movements of his statuesque stars, rolling from expertly immobile tableaux to near-subliminal bursts just a few frames long – in a flash, Mickey Rooney as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or newsprint of Adolf Hitler. But Scorpio’s great leap forward lies in its soundtrack of contemporaneous pop tunes, literally recorded from Anger’s record player, whose rhythm and heat fix its comic book death rite firmly to rails. Time and again, Anger has claimed the tracks were ironic commentary, but irony is only one valence at play in Scorpio’s ambiguous field. Detourned though they may be, the likes of Martha & The Vandellas’ “Heatwave” and The Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” narrate Anger’s own lusty, forlorn gaze. The dizzying powers of adolescent sock hopping would not be lost on David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet owes practically its entire psychotic lounge lizard vibe to Scorpio, nor on needle dropper par excellence Martin Scorsese, who credited the film with liberating his sense of soundtrack beyond the fear of copyright: “Now here was Kenneth Anger’s film in and out of the courts on obscenity charges, but no one seemed to be complaining that he’d used all those incredible tracks… That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed.”

Scorpio became an underground hit, bridging the audiences for Warholian art-trash and more cut and dried erotic fare. Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) – a lusher, miniature Scorpio for the hot rod set – hews even closer to the recognisable music video format with a fetishistic use of “Dream Lover” by Phil Spector’s Paris Sisters. At loose ends, Anger took up an unscrupulous American publisher’s offer to translate Hollywood Babylon, a book of macabre early Hollywood gossip Anger had written years earlier in France. Punched up by third parties, and fabricated wholesale in places by Anger, the book would come to mirror the disputed and contradictory details he would give about his own life in years to come. Its litany of California dream-turned-nightmares would prove prophetic for Anger’s circle at the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Relocating to San Francisco, Anger settled into his natural perch as countercultural elder, and cast guitarist Bobby Beausoleil as ‘Lucifer’, the protagonist to Scorpio’s imagined proper sequel. The two shot piecemeal footage across the city, from Anger’s apartment at the former Russian Embassy to the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, before LSD and cocaine abuse brought their collaboration to a meltdown. Alleging theft of film and equipment, Anger fled to England, where his Crowleyan bona fides proved fast entrée to the inner circle of The Rolling Stones. On his new Moog synthesizer, Mick Jagger improvised an unnerving electronic score to Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969), a rapid eye fever dream that – presided over by Anger as a raving Magus, and Anton LaVey in full Satanic regalia – distils the lost paradise of the Haight-Ashbury scene to its burning core. Back in the States, Beausoleil was picked up for a murder ordered by Charles Manson. Soon, The Stones would hazard into their own demonic rite: the killing of Meredith Hunter by Hell’s Angels, as if ripped from a frame of one of Anger’s films, at the Altamont Free Concert in December 1969.

Anger would shoot and assemble his final major film project in fits and starts over the next decade. The completed Lucifer Rising features Marianne Faithfull as Lillith, foremost goddess among a cast of psychologically blank young model types, tending their temple chambers and gesturing across the ruined geometries of Luxor, Egypt. Another falling out, this time with Jimmy Page, who’d cut a turgid attempt at a drone soundtrack, led to a reconciliation with Beausoleil, who composed an apt kosmische homage flanked by fellow inmates listed as The Freedom Orchestra from California’s Tracy Prison. Lucifer’s long and tangled gestation seems to have mellowed the magician’s edges; the results are surface-driven and serene, New Age chic with hints of coke bloat at the periphery. The birth of the Morning Star, as it turns out, looks a lot like a fashion shoot.

Lucifer Rising finally premiered in 1981, the same year as the launch of MTV. Anger claimed he was never invited to make music videos, but then he also claimed disdain for the format. The decade would see Anger largely relinquish his sway over a culture which, ironically, had remade itself in his image: hyper-saturated, queer, post-Christian, and medium cool. In the 60s, the press had played up a rivalry with Andy Warhol, but on matters of commercial sensibility, there could be no comparison. In 1984, once again low on funds, he published Hollywood Babylon II (he claimed to have written a third, but shelved it for fear of reprisal from Thelema’s corporatised double, the Church of Scientology). Bill Landis published his fascinating (and criminally out-of-print) unauthorised biography Anger in 1995, at the cost of their friendship.

Anger’s preferred mode of artistry in his last decades was self-mythologising, and while he would return to filmmaking late in life, it was less as hierophant than totem – the worn keepsake of a once powerful magick. He made films on commission, for luxury brands and private collections; a collaboration with psychedelicist Brian Butler yielded the band Technicolor Skull, whose performances involved Anger playing theremin over live projections of his old films. He sat for interviews looking gaunt and malign, and stood for portraits at the Chateau Marmont, or bearing the tattoo that read ‘LUCIFER’ across his chest –finally, it seems, he got the part.

To say that we live today in Kenneth Anger’s world is to ignore the dread razor’s edge where he lived and worked for his most productive years, an edge from which most of us who wish to believe otherwise now instinctively shrink. Here, perhaps – preserved as he was through dark alchemy in semi-solitude for nearly a century – there is some cautionary instruction. In a media ecosystem where botnets of paranoid suburbanites scour furniture retailers for evidence of Satanic mischief, the poison pen manifestos of a gay, drug-addled pagan would be enough to stoke convulsions. That his own offer no quarter to ostensible allies or comrades would seem to confirm the sentence of exile. Most difficult of all to imagine returning today, though, is the instinctive fluidity and invention which Anger brought to his form, an incantatory language that was both his sickness and his song. But then, his best works still speak with the voice of prophecy unfulfilled. Kenneth may be gone, but Anger is rising.

Wire subscribers can read Richard Henderson's 2004 interview with Anger, and Edwin Pouncey's essay on the use of ritual in the film maker's work, in The Wire 247 via the online library.