Kenneth Anger, Avant-Garde Filmmaker and Hollywood Fabulist, Dead at Age 96
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Fred Schruers, May 24, 2023 10:42 am — “ … The difference between Anger and any number of Hollywood fabulists and mountebanks was that his early encouragement in avant-garde film came via experimental film legend and artist Jean Cocteau, who invited him to France circa 1950. And Anger’s decision to make his addictive Hollywood scandal samplers was encouraged (by his own often-hyperbolic account) by his Cahiers du Cinema mentors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Perhaps the oddest outlier of Anger’s celebrated cohort of visionaries, artistes, criminals, and the simply notorious was sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who filmed him masturbating for one of his legendary reports. But just as striking but perhaps more logical given Anger’s deep immersion in (mostly male-on-male) erotica, is the appearance of novelist Anaïs Nin, doddering through the hallucinatory, transgressive episodes of “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.” …“ | https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/kenneth-anger-dead-1234682825/
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“ … [Kenneth Anger] gilt als Pionier des amerikanischen Underground-Films und drehte innovative und provokante Werke, die viele spätere Filmemacher beeinflussten. … [Er war] einer der ersten offen homosexuellen amerikanischen Filmemacher … Anger begann bereits im Alter von elf Jahren Filme zu machen. Viele seiner frühen Arbeiten existieren jedoch nicht mehr. Sein künstlerischer Ausdruck ist stark durch seine Faszination für Übernatürliches und Aleister Crowley beeinflusst. Von Beginn an setzte sich Anger mit okkulten Themen auseinander, die auch Ästhetik und Inhalt seiner Filme beeinflussten. … Rituale des Verkleidens und der Maskerade verbinden fast alle Filme Angers … “ | https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Anger
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Brecht Andersch „Kenneth Anger & Me“ (December 16, 2009): “ … My first encounter with Anger’s cinema occurred in a small but crowded Austin, Tx. theater in 1985. A featured work in a show of experimental films emblazoned with the eye-catching title Sex and Blasphemy in the Avant-Garde, Scorpio Rising swiftly proved itself an intoxicating tonic to the college-age post-punk scenesters of various stripes who surrounded me. …“ | https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2009/12/kenneth-anger/
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[2017] : CLOSE UP: AMERICA YEAR ZERO – Ara Osterweil on Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) — “ … Fireworks’ insistence on the actuality of homoerotic desire and sexual activity was a first in American cinema. Yet the sexual desires that animate the film did not ignite in a vacuum: They were part of an emerging gay culture in midcentury Los Angeles. …“ | https://www.artforum.com/print/201701/ara-osterweil-on-kenneth-anger-s-fireworks-1947-65390