He Celebrated Pleasure While Delving Into Its Dark Depths

Kenneth Anger’s career began in 1947 with a surprisingly banal event: a weekend with the place to himself. The young director, then 20, who had already directed a handful of shorts (now largely lost), used his parents’ apartment in Beverly Hills to pin to celluloid a fantasy packed with sex, violence, and romance. Given Anger’s evident appetite for ambition, it’s not surprising that “Fireworks” would emerge as a milestone in experimental and queer cinema.

In the film’s allegorical voice-over, the piece starts with our easily kindled desire—an impulse we suppress by day, only to see erupt at night in a blaze of gleam and heat. Anger himself stars as the main character, presenting his naked, wiry, sleeping body as a confident object of desire. A makeshift sign reading “Gents” ushers him into a dark dreamscape where a group of sailors undresses, humiliates, and beats him. The 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, which Anger witnessed first-hand, inspired this very scene. White sailors in flamboyantly tailored suits roamed the streets of Los Angeles, assaulting Latinos.

What matters in “Fireworks,” however, is that the brutality is charged with sexuality. The victim’s distorted, almost ecstatic expression is smeared with blood and, more than that, with a milky fluid that runs down his face in a suggestive, almost ceremonial glow. Later, a sailor pulls a large firecracker from his fly and lights it. As reckless as this phallic symbol’s sparks, so uncontrolled the sexuality in the film appears. One can easily imagine how disturbing and offensive “Fireworks” must have seemed at the time of its making. Homosexuality was illegal then, and both Anger and a cinema operator faced charges of obscenity in connection with the film.

Nine short films released between 1947 and 1980

“Fireworks” is the opening salvo in a suite of nine short films produced between 1947 and 1980 and gathered under the umbrella of the Magick Lantern Cycle. The title nods both to the Lanterna Magica, an early form of cinema, and to Aleister Crowley—the occultist whose rites Anger revered as a kind of spiritual patron. The films are frequently enigmatic, provocative, vividly colored, sensually charged, and campy. They lean into myth and into the rebellious counterculture of the postwar era.

“Fireworks” is emblematic of Anger’s work in its fetishization of clothing—here, the sailor uniforms that sit within the standard repertoire of gay stereotypes—and of athletic, striking men who are both alluring and menacing. The lure of the forbidden and the seduction of evil are central motifs in Anger’s films. Anger’s landmark contribution to queer cinema also includes a triumphal, anarchic, and dangerously seductive manliness—a manliness he would later exalt in “Scorpio Rising” (1963). That half-hour movie follows muscle-bound motorcycle enthusiasts, their obsessive relationship with machines, and their radical outsider status, a subculture Anger ties to revolutionary as well as fascist undertones.

Leather gear on bare skin
The leather-clad, often bare-skinned biker archetype is repeatedly staged as an object of aestheticized desire. Anger provocatively places the bikers’ hands on their hips and uses a camera angle that emphasizes the midriff and groin—an instinctive, carnal line of sight. The film’s camaraderie and mocking bravado unfold in a homoerotic register. A soundtrack of early 1960s pop songs comments on the action in ways that are often double-entendres: the fetish of clothing (“Blue Velvet”), the motorcycles’ emotional resonance (“Wind-Up Doll”), the dangerous energy that slumbers in the men (“Devil in Disguise”), or the biker-gang leadership cult (“I Will Follow Him”). In Anger’s view, these rebels are Hollywood icons—think Marlon Brando or James Dean—tuned to a death-drive, straddling the line between Jesus and Hitler, as the montage suggests. They are charismatic figures who pull you toward the edge of the abyss.

Wild men with erotic aura recur throughout Anger’s oeuvre. Consider the muscular, demon-eyed Pan in “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” or the salvific hippie-antichrist in “Lucifer Rising,” where the devil embodies the ultimate bad boy. In “Rabbit’s Moon,” the anarchic trickster Arlecchino from the Commedia dell’arte teases Pierrot with pranks. For the 1950 production—held in France but released only in 1971—Anger used a set by Jean-Pierre Melville, whose own crime dramas are celebrated for their deliberate pace.

Anger loves to tease the audience
There’s a mischievous streak in Kenneth Anger himself. His production company Puck was named after the cunning elf in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The logo bears a line from the play: “What fools these mortals be.” Anger liked to toy with his audience and didn’t always tell the truth in interviews. Sometimes the deception served a purpose—for example, when money for “Lucifer Rising” ran dry in 1967, he announced his own death in a newspaper advertisement as a publicity stunt.

“Lucifer Rising” (1972) is among Anger’s best-known works precisely because of its tumultuous production history, the psychedelically playful rock soundtrack by convicted killer Bobby Beausoleil, and the star-studded cast. The singer Marianne Faithfull plays the demon Lilith, and director Donald Cammell (the co-creator of “Performance”) and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page—also a noted devotee of Crowley—were among those who appeared on camera. The result is a delirious odyssey through Satan’s resurrection, shot across international locales, with spectacular elemental forces, hypnotic rites, and an enigmatic storyline. Anger proves, once again, that he is a monumental filmmaker of experimental cinema.

The devil in the film is a charismatic, redemptive revolutionary figure signaling a new era. In “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969)—a precursor to “Lucifer Rising”—mythic, pop-cultural, sexual, and political forces mingle. Viewers see Anger in stylized motion during an occult ceremony, hippies smoking pot, naked young men grappling with one another, footage from the Vietnam War, the founder of the Church of Satan disguised as the devil, and Mick Jagger (who also recorded the experimental Moog soundtrack) at a Stones concert. In this juxtaposition, Satan emerges as a contemporary rock star of the era.

Some films remained fragments
Anger’s work often reads as unfinished, a result of years or even decades elapsing before some films were screened publicly. Some exist in multiple cuts with different soundtracks, while others survive only as fragments.

For example, “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965) — like “Scorpio Rising” — explores the masculine fascination with machines, albeit in a more stylized form: in a pink studio, a young man in a tight light-blue outfit polishes his race car. Tenderly he sweeps the chrome with a feather-duster as the song “Dream Lover” underscores his emotional attachment to the car. As the camera circles, the car’s sleek contours bleed into the young man’s well-formed buttocks. The three-minute film was originally intended as reference material for a feature that never got financed.

“Puce Moment” (1949) also remained unfinished, capturing Anger’s fascination with Old Hollywood’s glamour and decadence. The 1920s flapper dresses—embroidered with beads—were worn by Anger’s grandmother, a costume designer during the silent era. “Puce Moment” presents a woman, played by Anger’s cousin Yvonne Marquis, who appears to be self-sufficient within her luxurious life. Yet Jonathan Halper’s kaleidoscopic folk ballad “Leaving My Old Life Behind” foreshadows a transformation. It isn’t what she does or whom she meets that matters; it’s she herself and her metamorphosis that are the spectacle.

Anger’s Hollywood fixation

Anger’s obsession with the glimmering surface of the dream factory, as well as the fissures that lie behind it, recurs throughout his work. In 1965 he published “Hollywood Babylon,” a book that revels in sensational gossip about stars and their scandals. The film “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1953) centers on an elite circle and its secret rituals. Inspiration for the film stemmed in part from Renate Druks’s costume party—its motto being “Come as Your Madness”—and in part from Aleister Crowley’s concept of a masked ball in which guests assume roles as gods. Shiva, Osiris, Aphrodite, Isis, and Ganymede appear among the revelers in flamboyant costumes. Partygoers boast colored hair, lush hairdos, expressive makeup, and grotesque garments. The emphasis is as much on the pleasure of disguise as on the longing to present oneself. As a ritualized drink is passed around, the party dissolves into ecstatic intoxication, achieved through a cascade of dissolving overlays. Anger’s films relish all manner of splendor—textiles, ornaments, extravagant props, and, more generally, beautiful things that sparkle with promise—be it a jeweled adornment, a chrome-plated motorcycle, or the fountains at the Villa d’Este just outside Rome’s gates.

An overwhelming desire
The crowning achievement of the cycle is “Eaux d’artifice” (1953). The human figure stays offstage, reduced to a mere prop. A woman in Renaissance garb glides through an endlessly looping garden labyrinth to the strains of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Yet she remains largely obscured, her face hidden behind a fan and an anachronistic pair of sunglasses.

What steals the show are the intricately choreographed fountains. Water arcs through the air, spills down stairs and over statues, and shines with a pale, milky radiance. The water’s ceaseless, luminous flow feels both mystical and poetic, evoking the sensuous rush of bodily fluids. It’s hardly an accident that this film nods to “Fireworks”—the French title is Feu d’artifice. Both works depict an overwhelming longing—yet in one film it’s literally sparks, while in the other it pours forth without restraint. The mood is distinct: while “Fireworks” probes the dark corners of sexuality, “Eaux d’artifice” is a buoyant, life-affirming celebration of desire.

After the Magick Lantern Cycle, Anger did not make a new film for two decades, returning to short-format work only around 2000 and continuing until 2013. He died a decade later, at the age of 96.

The article series “Queer Cinema Classics” is supported by the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation. It appears concurrently at sissy and TheColu.mn.