Kenneth Anger
12 min
USA 1969

Through his numerous films Kenneth Anger exploits and constructs a cinema of the occult. With its Mick Jagger guitar-frenzied soundtrack (and flashes of the Rolling Stones in performance) Anger gives full and glorious vent to an explicit homoeroticism, occult symbolism and ritual; boys with tattoos, soldiers climbing out of a helicopter, an Egyptian eye, a skull… this is altogether a very other deployment of the magic of cinema.

Kenneth Anger
(1927) USA

Kenneth Anger [Kenneth Wybur Anglemyer] started making films in Hollywood in the mid 1940s - inspired by Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet - Anger becoming a lead player in the emerging American Underground film movement with films such as Fireworks (1947), made when he was only 20 years old, and the notorious Scorpio Rising (1963). He lived and worked in London for periods from the 1950s onwards where he edited Invocation of My Demon Brother from material mostly shot in the USA, Mick Jagger adding its music.

Kenneth Anger, Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969 © courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave Modern Art, London