Anger Management
Date: 19 June 2009
Available at last on DVD, the Magick Lantern cycle.
Kenneth Anger is a notoriously difficult man, and a famous satanist to boot, but when he made a personal appearance at the London Film Festival three years ago to present the restorations of his works which appear on this DVD he was avuncularity personified in cuban heels, PVC trousers and a custom 'ANGER' football shirt, like the satanic granddad I never had. It's like Lars von Trier said: you have to take the good with the evil.
And from good to evil, there are some proper treats on these discs. The Magick Lantern cycle, from the cock-rocket (litearally) of Fireworks to the occult ritual of Lucifer Rising is the work of a one-man avant-garde. One of my personal favourites is Eaux d'Artifice, which turns from a camp romp through an Italian garden into something different and delightful: blue-tinted streams of water cascading across the screen become more like direct cinema, writing with light on film. It exemplifies the uncategorisabale nature of Anger's work, crossing the boundaries between performance, documentary and formalism in a single film.
Elio Gelminis' not-so-well-received accompanying documentary, Anger Me, catches Anger in reflective, talking-head mode. A son of Hollywood (classmate of Judy Garland and Shirley Temple) and friend of film and rock stars (when I saw this at the NFT, I had to make Anita Pallenberg get out of my seat), Anger's life itself is a trawl through the dark side of late twentieth-century pop-culture.
Anger's still going strong at nearly 80 (check out Mouse Heaven), but the Magick Lantern cycle has been unavailable to the public for a long time. Now it's available in the kind of handsome-looking archive box-set that BFI DVD are beginning to claim as their own, you no longer have to make do with the scratchy YouTube clips. Sit back and luxuriate in a Puce Moment all of your own.
The Magick Lantern Cycle is now available at the ICA Bookshop.
Danny Birchall
ICA Website Manager
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