Kenneth Anger, creator of visionary and transgressive movies, has died, aged 96

Kenneth Anger, a monumental determine in American avant-garde cinema and transferring picture artwork, died on 11 Could at an assisted-living facility in Yucca Valley, California. He was 96 years outdated. His dying was confirmed by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, the gallerists who’ve represented Anger since 2009.

Anger was finest recognized for his transgressive, boundary-pushing cinematic works, together with such movies as Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963), which went towards the formal and social constraints of their day and, within the course of, helped map new terrain for American underground movie and finally popular culture at giant.

Anger was born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer in 1927 in Santa Monica, California, to a middle-class Presbyterian household. Though he would later declare, in a attribute act of self-mythologisation, that he had acted in a 1935 model of A Midsummer Evening’s Dream, his first confirmed expertise with filmmaking got here in 1937—at age ten—when he made his very first quick movie, Ferdinand the Bull, on a roll of 16mm movie left over from a household trip. He continued making movies all through adolescence, usually riffing on classical mythology and science fiction serials. He rapidly developed a knack for formal and conceptual experimentation. “I name them cine-poems,” Anger mentioned of his work in an interview with Dazed in 2011. “They don’t seem to be narrative movies however reasonably, tales advised in footage.”

These experiments ultimately crystallised in his 1947 movie Fireworks, a jittery, jump-cut concoction of haughty Greek-tinged drama and surrealist psychosexual pulp that was additionally one of many earliest examples of explicitly queer experimental cinema. The movie, which options an orgiastic centrepiece of masochistic masculine violence, ultimately turned the topic of an obscenity trial that, after it went all the best way to Los Angeles County Supreme Court docket in 1959, helped loosen restrictions on so-called “obscene” content material within the arts.

Within the years after Fireworks, Anger continued to push on the aesthetic and political bounds of tact and good style. He launched into various inventive tasks, together with a bevy of quick movies in addition to his notorious 1959 novel Hollywood Babylon, which detailed a number of sordid half-truths concerning the lives and deaths of assorted Tinseltown celebrities.

In 1963, he launched maybe his most well-known movie, Scorpio Rising, a lysergic mixture of leather-based, faith and authoritarian violence whose deliberately blasphemous content material—together with clips of leather-clad bikers spliced with each Christian and Nazi iconography—tracked with Anger’s curiosity within the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley and the Satanist Anton LaVey. Over the subsequent decade, Anger would prolong his pursuit of those occultist visions, culminating in 1972’s Lucifer Rising. After its launch, Anger didn’t produce one other movie for almost 30 years.

Throughout this hiatus, Anger’s distinctive model of pop-flecked transgression blossomed into one thing unlikely: a real creative mainstay. Hollywood auteurs equivalent to David Lynch and Martin Scorsese have cited Anger as an affect, and his propulsive soundtracks and enhancing have even been credited with foreshadowing (and presumably shaping) music video aesthetics. Whereas Anger might have stayed firmly on the aspect of transgression, his creative affect has unfold to many corners of the visible mainstream—maybe a becoming legacy for a persistent pusher of boundaries.

“Kenneth was a trailblazer,” Sprüth and Magers mentioned in an announcement. “His cinematic genius and affect will stay on and proceed to rework all those that encounter his movies, phrases and imaginative and prescient.”