Country: United States
Director: Kenneth Anger
Starring: Kenneth Anger, various
Review By: Jeff
Rating: 4 out of 4 stars (outstanding)

Thanks to the hard work of Fantoma Films, the oeuvre of the legendary experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger has experienced quite a resurgence in interest. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of reviewing Fantoma’s DVD release of The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 1. Check out my review of that DVD here for background information regarding Anger and his works. The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 2 is an even stronger collection than its predecessor, as it features many of Anger’s most famous and accomplished works.

Scorpio Rising (1964)

Scorpio Rising is easily Kenneth Anger’s greatest film, and a landmark of film history in general. However, unlike many film school staples, Scorpio Rising does not appear to have lost any of its power to shock and fascinate. Notorious as the movie that made America recognize that leather-clad bikers were kinda gay, the film follows around a rather scary group of Brooklyn-based motorcycle enthusiasts. It presents the bikers as a sect with its own unique garb and rituals, and juxtaposes their exploits with a wall-to-wall score of classic rock ‘n roll tunes.

As the program notes included in the DVD booklet recognize, Scorpio Rising can be analyzed as a work with four separate movements. In the film’s first two movements, Anger’s camera captures the private rituals of several of the bikers: working on a chopper, putting on biker gear, snorting amphetamines, and reading the funnies. In the film’s third movement, the bikers get together for a costume party that quickly descends into homoerotic horseplay. (As an ironic counterpoint, Anger intercuts snippets of a cheesy religious film of the life of Christ.) The film’s final movement crescendos as one biker indulges in Nazism and blasphemy while a bike race elsewhere turns deadly for another.

While the above synopsis is accurate, it fails to convey the power and complexity of this film. In his commentary track, Anger contends that the film is basically a record of actual people, events, and locations. I have my doubts, given the meticulous-looking compositions and recurring visual symbols (death, fascism, Hollywood idols, scorpions) that appear throughout the film. However, the extent to which Scorpio Rising is or is not a documentary is ultimately an irrelevant consideration — its immediacy and humor are undiminished in either event.

Just as important as the images are the songs in Scorpio Rising. It was perhaps the first film to truly harness the power of rock ‘n roll songs. In Scorpio Rising, the rock ‘n roll songs give additional weight to the film’s editing rhythms through their beats and provide ironic commentary through their lyrics. (This is a technique that has subsequently been used to great effect by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, among many others.)

Quite simply, Scorpio Rising is essential viewing for any film fan, and by itself earns this DVD compilation four stars.

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)

Kustom Kar Kommandos is the mirror image of Scorpio Rising. Whereas Scorpio Rising was a no-holds-barred look at the tough and violent world of Brooklyn biker gangs, Kustom Kar Kommandos is a pastel-colored fantasia, an homage to California hot rods and the men who customized them. Perhaps even more overtly erotic than Scorpio Rising (if such a thing is possible), this very brief film depicts a man polishing his hot rod with some kind of oversized pink powderpuff, as the camera glides over every nook and cranny of the car, as well as the gentleman’s extremely tight, aquamarine pants. All of this is set against a hot-pink backdrop and accompanied by a breathy female rendition of the classic tune “Dream Lover.” The primary aesthetic inspiration for this intentionally kitschy film appears to have been the promotional films that industrial titans such as General Motors cranked out in the 1950s and 1960s to promote their new product lines. This is a very witty film that has lost none of its bite over the years. They certainly don’t make cars (or films) like this any more.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)

Like many of Anger’s films, Invocation of My Demon Brother is a fragment from a longer work that Anger was never able to complete. In this case, the source of Anger’s footage was his aborted attempt to film Lucifer Rising in San Francisco with musician and future Manson family murderer Bobby Beausoleil starring as the title character. However, unlike many of the other film fragments that Anger released over the years, Invocation of My Demon Brother does not give the impression of constituting one complete chapter of a larger, imaginary work that the viewer is forced to complete in his or her head. Rather, the film is a quintessential late 1960s freakout, containing a hodgepodge of footage of drug use, an albino, pagan ritual, stock footage of the Vietnam War, the Rolling Stones in concert, abstract imagery, and Beausoleil’s real life musical ensemble in action. All of this is played back at various speeds, and is accompanied by a repetitive, droning musical score that is credited to Mick Jagger. Definitely an interesting curiosity, and one heck of a time capsule.

Rabbit’s Moon (re-edit) (1979)

Filmed in France in 1950, Rabbit’s Moon is a tragic tale derived from the commedia dell’arte. The Films of Kenneth Anger Volume 1 contained Anger’s original edit of Rabbit’s Moon, which was far and away one of the highlights of that DVD. (See my review of Volume 1 for more details about the plot, cinematography and mise en scène of Rabbit’s Moon.) Set to a soundtrack of wonderful, wistful doo-wop music, the original edit of Rabbit’s Moon was a touching (albeit campy) tale of unrequited love and the cruelty of unattainable beauty. Volume 2 contains Anger’s 1970s re-edit of the film, which is a horse of a completely different color. By step-printing every other frame of the film (which gives the characters’ movements a jerky, “fast-forward” quality), and replacing the original doo-wop soundtrack with a catchy but somewhat annoying proto-New Wave song, Anger drained the film of its pathos, and left it with an arch, alienating, jittery feel. While I can’t imagine anyone preferring this edit to the original, it serves as a testament of the power of sound and editing to completely shape a film.

Lucifer Rising (1981)

Years after Anger’s original attempt to film Lucifer Rising fell apart, he was able to successfully complete the entire work as a (relatively) lavish international production starring chanteuse Marianne Faithfull and director Donald Cammell, among others. Very different in tone and ambiance from Invocation of My Demon Brother, the final version of Lucifer Rising is a stately and fairly slow-moving work. Although its plot features recognizable mythical figures such as Lucifer and Isis, the work’s plot and meaning will appear fairly obscure to viewers such as myself who have limited knowledge of the works of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, upon whose writings the film (like many of Anger’s other works) is based. Nonetheless, the film’s imagery is quite bold and memorable; the film’s highlights, such as the opening sequence of lava and the climactic appearance of a UFO, are burned in my memory. However, the absolute highlight of the film is the extraordinary score that Anger’s original Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, composed and recorded in prison with a rotating cast of other inmates. This dramatic and powerful music, with its dissonance, orchestral sweep and rock-and-roll instrumentation, presages the “post-rock” movement of the 1990s, and the work of the rock band Godspeed You Black Emperor in particular. Absolutely stunning stuff to say the least.

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DVD DETAILS

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DVD Company: Fantoma (http://www.fantoma.com)
Release Date: October 2, 2007

Extras: Director’s audio commentary, restoration demonstration, 48-page booklet, bonus short film

Fantoma has put together a package for The Films of Kenneth Anger Volume 2 that is just as strong as its presentation of Volume 1. As in Volume 1, each film in Volume 2 contains an optional audio commentary track by Anger. Anger doesn’t speak a great deal about his filmmaking technique here, but he does provide some extremely colorful and eye-opening gossip about the celebrities and average joes who appeared in his films, and entertainingly rails against the evils of smoking. The 48-page booklet features some thoughtful insights from a few famous Anger acolytes (Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant, Guy Maddin), as well as cryptic production notes, rare photos, and a hair-raising personal narrative from Bobby Beausoleil. Additionally, the DVD also includes a recent short film by Anger entitled The Man We Want to Hang. However, this is simply a filmed record of an exhibition of some rather ugly Crowley paintings, and is of little interest to those who are not Crowley devotees. Finally, Fantoma has provided an alternate audio track for Invocation of My Demon Brother that contains some of the improvisational music that Beausoleil and his cohorts were generating at the time of filming. Although I am not usually a fan of completely improvised music, this is some spooky stuff that fits quite well with the film, and is definitely less abrasive than Jagger’s official soundtrack.