1. Kenneth Anger has been called "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers", with several films released before homosexuality was legalized in the US Anger explored occult themes in many of his films; he was fascinated by the English occultist Aleister Crowley and an adherent of Thelema, the religion Crowley founded.
Kenneth Anger was born into a middle-class Presbyterian family in Santa Monica, California.
Kenneth Anger began making short films when he was 14 years old, although his first film to gain any recognition was the homoerotic Fireworks.
Kenneth Anger was born as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer on February 3,1927, in Santa Monica, California.
Kenneth Anger's family was Presbyterian, but he became more interested in the occult.
Kenneth Anger's father, Wilbur Anglemyer, was of German ancestry and was born in Troy, Ohio, while his disabled mother, Lillian Coler, had English ancestry.
Kenneth Anger's parents met at Ohio State University and after marrying had their first child, Jean Anglemyer, in 1918, followed by a second, Robert "Bob" Anglemyer, in 1921.
Kenneth Anger, their third and final child, was born in 1927.
Kenneth Anger's grandmother Bertha was a strong influence on the young Kenneth and supported the family financially during the Great Depression.
Kenneth Anger developed an early interest in film and enjoyed reading the movie tie-in Big Little books.
Kenneth Anger claimed in Hollywood Babylon II that he played the Changeling Prince in the 1935 Warner Brothers film A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the character was played by a girl named Sheila Brown.
In Ferdinand the Bull, which has never been made publicly available, Kenneth Anger dressed as a matador, wearing a cape, while two of his friends from the Boy Scouts played the bull.
Many of these early films are considered lost, with Kenneth Anger burning much of his previous work in 1967.
In 1944, the Anglemyers moved to Hollywood to move in with family, and Kenneth Anger began attending Beverly Hills High School.
Around this time, Kenneth Anger began attending screenings of silent films at Clara Grossman's art gallery, through which he met a fellow filmmaker, Curtis Harrington, with whom he formed Creative Film Associates.
Kenneth Anger was interested in the works of the French ceremonial magician Eliphas Levi, as well as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, although his favorite writings were Crowley's; he eventually converted to Thelema, the religion Crowley founded.
Kenneth Anger discovered his homosexuality at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in the United States, and he began associating with the underground gay scene.
Kenneth Anger started attending the University of Southern California, where he studied cinema, and began experimenting with the use of mind-altering drugs like cannabis and peyote.
Kenneth Anger was acquitted after the case went to the Supreme Court of California, which deemed the film art, not pornography.
Twenty years old when he made Fireworks, Kenneth Anger claimed to have been 17, presumably to present himself as more of an enfant terrible.
That same year, Kenneth Anger directed The Love That Whirls, a film based on Aztec human sacrifice; because of the nudity it contained, it was destroyed by technicians at the film lab who deemed it obscene.
In 1950, Kenneth Anger moved to Paris, France, where he initially stayed with friends of his who had been forced to leave Hollywood after being blacklisted for having formerly belonged to trade union organizations.
Kenneth Anger later said he traveled to Paris after receiving a letter from the French director Jean Cocteau in which he told Anger of his admiration for Fireworks.
In Paris, Kenneth Anger continued producing short films; in 1950 he started filming Rabbit's Moon, about a clown who stares up at the Moon, where a rabbit lives, as in Japanese mythology.
Kenneth Anger produced 20 minutes of footage at the Films du Pantheon Studio before he was rushed out of the building, leaving the film uncompleted.
Kenneth Anger stored the footage in the disorganized archives of the Cinematheque Francaise and retrieved it in 1970, when he finally finished and released the film.
In 1953, Kenneth Anger traveled to Rome, Italy, where he planned to make a film about the 16th-century occultist Cardinal d'Este.
In 1953, soon after the production of Eaux d'Artifice, Kenneth Anger's mother died, and he temporarily returned to the US to assist with the distribution of her estate.
The party and its many costumes inspired Kenneth Anger, who produced a painting of it, and asked several of those who attended to appear in a new film he was creating, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Kenneth Anger subsequently exhibited the film at various European film festivals, winning the Prix du Cine-Club Belge and the Prix de l'Age d'Or, as well as screening it in the form of a projected triptych at Expo 58, the World Fair held in Brussels in 1958.
Crowley had used the abbey for his commune during the 1920s, and Kenneth Anger restored many of the erotic wall paintings that were found there, as well as performing certain Crowleyan rituals at the site.
The next year, after Kinsey's death, Kenneth Anger decided to return to Paris; he was described at the time as being "extremely remote and lonely".
Kenneth Anger began work on a new feature, Scorpio Rising, about the biker subculture.
Kenneth Anger incorporated more controversial visuals into the piece, including Nazi iconography, nudity, and clips of the life of Jesus Christ taken from the Family Films' The Living Bible: Last Journey to Jerusalem, images of Jesus which are intercut with those of Scorpio.
Now living in San Francisco, Kenneth Anger approached the Ford Foundation, which had just started a program of grants to filmmakers.
Kenneth Anger showed the foundation his ideas for a new artistic short, Kustom Kar Kommandos, which they approved of, giving him a grant of $10,000.
Kenneth Anger spent much of the money on living expenses and alterations to some of his films, so that by the time he actually created Kustom Kar Kommandos, it was only one scene long.
Around the same time Kenneth Anger translated Lo Duca's History of Eroticism into English for American publication.
The mid-1960s saw the emergence of the hippie scene and increasing use of the mind-altering drugs Kenneth Anger had been using for many years.
In particular, the hallucinogen LSD, at the time still legal in the US, was very popular, and in 1966 Kenneth Anger released a version of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome he called the "Sacred Mushroom Edition", which was screened to people while taking LSD, thereby heightening their sensory experience.
In 1966, Kenneth Anger moved into the ground floor of the William Westerfeld House, a large 19th-century Victorian house in San Francisco known as the "Russian Embassy".
Kenneth Anger tattooed Lucifer's name on his chest and began searching for a young man who could symbolically become Lucifer, "the Crowned and Conquering Child" of the new Aeon, for the film.
In 1967, Kenneth Anger said the footage he had been filming for Lucifer Rising had been stolen, accusing Beausoleil, who denied it.
Landis quotes Beausoleil as saying, "[W]hat had happened was that Kenneth Anger had spent all the money that was invested in Lucifer Rising" and that he therefore invented the story to satisfy the film's creditors.
Beausoleil and Kenneth Anger fell out, with the former getting involved with Charles Manson and the Manson Family.
Kenneth Anger decided to use much of the footage created for Lucifer Rising in a new film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, which starred Beausoleil, LaVey, Jagger, Richards, and Kenneth Anger, the music for which was composed by Jagger.
Kenneth Anger persuaded the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull to appear in the film, and unsuccessfully tried to convince Jagger to play Lucifer; instead he offered his brother Chris the part.
Kenneth Anger befriended Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page around this time, the two sharing a great interest in Crowley.
Kenneth Anger later fell out with Page's partner, Charlotte, who kicked him out of the house.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Anger, who had moved to a small apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, took the footage he had filmed for Rabbit's Moon in the 1950s, finally released the film in 1972, and again in a shorter version in 1979.
Kenneth Anger created a short film, Senators in Bondage, available only to private collectors and never made publicly available.
Kenneth Anger had plans to make a film about Aleister Crowley titled The Wickedest Man in the World, but this project never got off the ground.
In 1981, a decade after starting the project, Kenneth Anger finally finished and released the 30-minute Lucifer Rising.
Kenneth Anger appeared in the film, as the Magus, the same role he played in Invocation of My Demon Brother.
Kenneth Anger himself considered producing other films that would continue on from Lucifer Rising in a series, and he began calling his finished film Part I: Sign Language, to be followed by two further parts.
In 1986, Kenneth Anger sold the video rights to his films, which finally appeared on VHS, allowing them to have greater publicity.
In 1993, Kenneth Anger visited Sydney and lectured at a season of his films at the Australian Film Institute Cinema.
In 2000, Kenneth Anger began screening a new short film, the anti-smoking Don't Smoke That Cigarette, followed a year later by The Man We Want to Hang, which comprised images of Crowley's paintings that had been shown at a temporary exhibition in Bloomsbury, London.
In 2004, he began showing Kenneth Anger Sees Red, a short surrealistic film starring himself, and the same year began showing another work, Patriotic Penis.
Kenneth Anger made an appearance in Nik Sheehan's 2008 feature documentary about Brion Gysin and the Dreamachine, FLicKeR.
Kenneth Anger appeared alongside Vincent Gallo in the 2009 short film Night of Pan, written and directed by Brian Butler.
Kenneth Anger finished writing Hollywood Babylon III but did not publish it, fearing severe legal repercussions if he did.
Kenneth Anger died at a care facility in Yucca Valley, California, on May 11,2023, at the age of 96.
Images of naked men appear in Invocation of My Demon Brother, where they are eventually filmed wrestling, and Kenneth Anger Sees Red, in which a muscled, topless man performs press-ups.
Kenneth Anger linked the creation of film to the occult, particularly the practice of ceremonial magic, something of which Crowley had been a noted practitioner.
One of the central recurring images in Kenneth Anger's work is flames and light; Fireworks has various examples, including a burning Christmas tree.
Kenneth Anger was known for his reclusive nature and had been called an "extremely private individual", although he gave various interviews over the years, including one with Rocco Castoro of Vice.
Kenneth Anger was a Thelemite and belonged to the main Thelemic organization, Ordo Templi Orientis.
Kenneth Anger viewed many of the men he associated with as living embodiments of Lucifer, a symbol of the Aeon of Horus in Thelemic philosophy, and had his own name inked onto his chest with the Lucifer tattoo.
Kenneth Anger showed an interest in various other religious movements, particularly those that related in some way to occultism.
Kenneth Anger called himself a pagan and did not consider himself a Satanist.
Kenneth Anger has called Wicca a "lunar", feminine religion in contrast to Thelema's "solar" masculinity.