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Dir. Kenneth Anger
USA
Film #17, of Wednesday 17th October, for Halloween 31 For 31
The films ‘made by Anger’ are
both maximalist but were made as underground and independent works, an economy
of means required for the bloody red images of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome to exist at all. As Leo Janacek’s majestic Glagolithic Mass plays over said
colours however, we can be glad Kenneth Anger exists in the first place.
I was originally going to review James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) but I couldn’t connect with it. I am both
a coward to not give a bad review to a film probably liked by many, but
reviewing films just after watching them that same night was bound to dumbfound
my mind at some point. I will say that on the first viewing I was disappointed,
reading the original H.G. Welles
story in anticipation of a rollicking write-up. Reading the original story, and
finishing it the same day you watch the film adaptation does not help, and the
amused tone James Whale gave the film
felt like a half hearted attempt to improve a weak entry in the Universal
horror catalogue. First viewings are fickle, but who puts a romantic interest
in the adaptation, none existent in the original story, and writes it like an
afterthought? Only a sentient pair of policeman’s trousers skipping along a
countryside road feels appropriately ‘magikal’ for this Halloween for me – the
rest feels too garbled in my mind right now to process out on a keyboard.
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Kenneth Anger as a myth is more appropriate for the witching
season, his biography so intangible in what the facts are, of his life and the
works that may have been lost or not, that it dwarfs Perfect Blue (1997), the film I reviewed in the last post, in terms
of the multiple realities and versions of Anger
even before you get to his films. Yes I am cheating at this point with the rules
of writing 31 reviews for horror films
or anything close to the genre, but unlike the hundreds to the dozen films
I could have chosen, I am choosing a film from a worthy candidate, who will be
remembered after his death and dealt in making his films into magical
incantations, far more profoundly absorbing and exhilarating than a camcorder
shot Dawn of the Dead (1978) rip-off
or something similar.
Inauguration... is the LSD awakening I will probably never
experience outside this film, a drug even championed by actor Cary Grant but illegalised in the US of
A and obsolete in its concepts of psychic awakening in the Millennia except
from musicians who evoke the psychedelia of the period. With its images of
naked bodies, swarming in mass, on a cliff in Hell superimposed between the
celebration of pure ecstasy however, this is not the LSD evolution Timothy Leary envisioned – his name
always evoking the girl who suggested we research him for a group project at
university, who was so achingly beautiful to me, and the only person yet I’ve
openly flirted with, that I cannot mention one without the other now, beauty
and acid trips as inseparate as in this film – his belief in the narcotic expanding
the mind rejected by Inauguration...
in favour of a complete separation from the confines of the human body and
reality.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) evoked how commercialism
of the legacy of Halloween was a destructive force, perfectly followed in this
season by a short film filtered with magical occultism, desiring to evoke a
subconscious effect on the viewer. Some may view that as a crass comparison,
but if the neglected sequel of mainstream horror franchise can open the doors
to this idea, an older gem of American experimental filmmaking is able to
develop it further. It took a few viewings to be fully impressed by Inauguration..., maybe needing another
or more beyond this review to fully embrace, but on a large blank screen, a
canvas, the 1950s melodrama of colours and a purple and/or lime green skinned Osiris
presiding over a Californian mass of unadulterated joy seeps into your eyes and
fills them fully. Is not Halloween a celebration of the supernatural, dressing
up in elaborate costumes – from a creature with long fingernails to Marilyn Monroe as a Greek Aphrodite – and
channelling the mysterious? That the film was inspired by a Halloween party at
which guests were invited to ‘Come As Your Madness’ cements the connection. As
a suburban English boy near the countryside, this grand spectacle is becoming
more enticing as art, maybe rising in me the dulled blood of my mystical
fathers on this pagan land and believers of the supernatural, while showing how
exceptionally well made it all is.
I cannot read into the influence
of Aleister Crowley in this film, but
with its flamingo pinks and crimson reds, yellows and greens, golds and
shadows, the film creates magical effects just through its elaborate colour
palette. Led by the hand into the film by the likes of the Scarlet Woman and
Cesare the Somnambulist, portrayed by filmmaker Curtis Harrington, bleeded from the black and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the overblown theatrics even
before Anger’s seminal Scorpio Rising (1963) created the closest
to what eventually became the music video but fully using the collaboration of
images and music to have a deeper gut and mind reaction. Montage, straight from
the books of director Sergei Eisenstein,
cut-up and arrange the orange-red images in a way to allow Anger to make the personal cinema he desired. Like the gems that
are eaten in the party guests, it is a collage of imagery and textures, filmed
in the house of Hollywood outsider Samson
De Bier, as rich as the home
shown on screen with its Japanese rugs to paintings of big eyed black cats
against the sliding door that leads to the Pleasure Dome. It is sensual at its
maximum, and with Janacek’s score allowed to be heard properly for the first
time for me on a decent sound system, my middle class surroundings felt at odds
with such a film, the doubling faces of the beings within the film’s world far
too intense for the restrained living room with its modest brown red motif. Drawing
from occultism, the supernatural and Hollywood – read Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
books if you can – it still stands out in whatever setting you view it, but you
also realise how forcibly normal your surroundings can be if viewed against the
work of a director trying to evoke other spiritual plains. I do not want to
image this playing at a modern cinema regardless if it caters to art films –
something like Inauguration of the
Pleasure Dome needs a ‘Dream Palace’ of early American cinema with its vast
decoration and rows of theatre seats like at an opera to feel at home in it,
not the Bauhaus-esque designs of modern buildings, without the elegant German
stylisation, or fast-food coloured multiplexes.
I’m glad this is available for me
to watch over and over again regardless. As my appreciation for experimentation
grows despite my pickiness with it, my admiration for Kenneth Anger that already existed is probably going to grow
immensely. And this sort of film feels so
more right for a Halloween season to write about. Films dealing with
supernatural entities of mythology make sense for Halloween, continuing the
legends even in modern settings. Something like dead teenager films or slashers
don’t the more you think about it outside of the Halloween series, more appropriate for any other time outside of
All Hallows Eve, except Christmas when homicidal Santa Claus films would be
more fitting. An incantation of pure adulterated pleasure within a full
spectrum of colours and occult symbolism feels far more of a celebration of the
month and fits with the pagan imagery that scares the conservative Christians
away.
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