No other contemporary film-maker has fuelled his own mythology as much as Kenneth
Anger. He zealously protects his real name even from close associates; he gives
interviewers substantially different accounts of his life and work; and he continually
revises his own films, sometimes radically altering their meaning by changing the entire
soundtrack. These notes are an attempt to construct an accurate outline of his career
since 1966 and, in particular, to cut through some of the confusion surrounding the
different versions of Luc. Rising.
Anger moved from New York (where he had made Scorpio Rising) to the West
Coast in late 1964 or early 1965. He set out to make a kind of scientific extension of
Scorpio about California?s hot-rod drivers and their lovingly customised cars, and
apparently shot nearly thirty minutes of usable material for it, but edited on the three
minute fragment Kustom Kar Kommandos. (His outline for the full project is
reprinted in P. Adams Sitney?s Visionary Film, 1974). This was released in 1965,
as ?work in progress.? In fact, though, Anger abandoned the project; he evidently lost
interest in it as he became fascinated with the first stirrings of Californian ?psychedelia.?
In 1966, he edited teh ?Sacred Mushroom Edition? of Inauguration on the Pleasure
Dome, using up to five layers of superimposition in the images and Janacek?s
Glagolithic Mass as the soundtrack.
By this time he was living in San Francisco in the mansion known as the ?Russian
Embassy? at 1198 Fulton Street. The Lucifer project began to take shape towards the end
of 1966. Sheldon Renan?s book An Introduction to the American Underground
Film (1967) reported that the film was to be about the ?holy? war between the
outgoing Piscean Age and the incoming Aquarian Age, as seen in the conflict between
teenagers and their parents; one scene was planned to show hippies kneeling along the
San Andreas Fault, praying for a ?liberating earthquake.? Anger confirmed this general
impression in an interview he gave to Jonathan Cott (The Sunday Ramparts, April
1967): It?s a film about the Love Generation, but seen in depth - like the Fourth
Dimension. It?s about love - the violence as well as the tenderness . . . There?s an
invisible war going on. It?s of Miltonic proportions and it?s a war between the forces of
life and death, love and hate. The film Lucifer Rising is a prophecy. I see the
embodiment of love among the children as winning. Lucifer is actually a sunshine child -
Little Sunshine . . . San Francisco artist Rick Griffin produced a Dore-esque poster
for the film with the slogan, ?a love vision.?
Anger told several interviewers (notably Mick Brown in Crawdaddy, 1976) that
his first Lucifer was a remarkable five-year old named Godot, who fell to his death from
a window, possibly believing he could fly. he also told both Cott and Brown about a
mysterious encounter with a mental hospital escapee: he performed Aleister Crowley?s
?Invocation of the Bornless One? in GOlden Gate Park at dawn and was rewarded with
the appearance of a oung man who called himself ?Joe Lucifer?, described himself as a
?man in a woman?s orbit?, and slipped away from Anger?s home a few days later, leaving
only his boots behind him, before Anger had a chance to film him. This fleeting visitor
apparently gave him valuable guidance for the project. Anger?s next ?Lucifer? was the
nineteen year old Robert K. Beausoleil, who moved into the house on Fulton Street.
According to Ed Sanders (The Family, 1971), Anger formed a band called the
Magick Powerhouse of Oz to perform the music for the film, with Beausoleil as its lead
guitarist and sitarist.
There is an extremely interesting account of Anger, Beausoleil and their circle in
Roger Peyrefittes?s ?factual novel?, Les Americains (1968). Although Peyrefitte
is somewhat preoccupied with the intricacies of anti-homosexual legislation in various of
the United States, his report of his conversations with Anger includes some details of
Le Lever de Lucifer, asides on Kinsey, hippies and California?s many groups of
occultists, and a vivid account of an orgiastic love-in at a Methodist church on Ellis
Street, where Beausoleil?s band performed naked.
On September 21, 1967, Anger organised a celebration of the Equinox of the Gods at the
Straight Theatre on Haight Street. The band played, Anger conducted magick rituals and
the proceedings were filmed. The event may have been a benefit to raise money for the
completion of the film. Either during or soon after that evening, some sixteen hundred
feet of edited rushes for Lucifer Rising were stolen, along with some equipment
and Anger?s car. Lucifer had been shot on reversal stock and there was no
negative of the missing footage. Anger has no doubt that Beausoleil was the thief. In any
event, Beausoleil disappeared at the same time as the film. he was soon associated with
Charles Manson, and arrested for the murder of the music teacher Gary Hinman; he is
currently serving a life sentence in Tracy Prison.
In mid-October, Anger went to the office of the Film-makers Co-op in New York, and
there burned what he said were his unreleased films in front of Jonas Mekas and others.
He went on to buy a full black-bordered page in the Village Voice (October 26 issue) to
announce his ?death?: In Memoriam - Kenneth Anger - FIlm-maker 1947-1967.
He then proceded to Washington to take part in one of the largest anti-Vietnam protests,
the March on the Pentagon. Anger reappeared in London in 1968. Far from abandoning
film-making, he entered a highly productive phase. He edited Rabbit?s Moon
from the rushes of his La Lune des Lapins, shot in Paris in the early 1950?s and
stored in the Cinematheque Francaise ever since. He reissued his 1948 short Puce
Moment with a new soundtrack. And he set about editing the few remaining
fragments of Lucifer Rising. After at least three ?trial? versions, he released the
eleven minute Invocation of My Demon Brother, with a synthesiser track by Mick
Jagger. The film incorporated a small amount of new footage (notably of the Rolling
Stone?s 1969 Hyde Park concert), but principally drew upon the footage shot at the
Equinox of the Gods event in September 1967. Anger called the film 'the last blast of Haight
consciousness.'
Anger's British distributor at the time was Jimmy Vaughn, of Vaughn-Rogosin Films, whose chief
business was selling American avant-garde films to German TV. Anger, living in the basement apartment
of Vaughn's house in Hampstead, began to formulate plans for a new Lucifer Rising. He told the
diarist of The Times (July 11, 1969) about an Aleister Crowley project that would ?intersperse
Crowley?s spiritual life with contemporary events, such as the sinking of the Titanic,? and
mentioned Nicol Williamson as a possible choice to play the young Crowley. Soon after,
he discovered a new Lucifer in the person of young Middlesbrough steel worker, Leslie
Huggins, and brought him to London. Vaughn pre-sold Lucifer Rising to the
German TV station NDR, and Anger began shooting with Huggins in 1970, using his
Hampstead apartment as a ?studio.? Before long, he moved to a considerably larger
apartment in Mount Street, Mayfair. Huggins proved to be no less elusive than previous
Lucifers, and schedules were more than once interrupted by the actor?s disappearances.
During one such hiatus, Anger edited the eight minute Lucifer Rising: Chapter
One (1971), using the Hampstead rushes; this centered on the Magus? dance around
the magick circle to invoke Lucifer, and ended like an episode of a serial. Then the
National Film Finance Corporation was persuaded to invest in Lucifer Rising,
prompting the outraged headline ?Devil Film to get State Aid? in The Sunday
Telegraph (March 28, 1971). The additional funding enabled Anger to shoot on
locations in Egypt and Germany (the Celtic rock-temple in the Lilith scenes). Back in
London, Anger used his Mount Street apartment as a ?studio? for further interiors and for
such ?special effects? as the glass shot of the Adept ?at? Stonehenge. It was at this point
that the film theorist Noel Burch briefly worked on the film.
Shooting halted when Anger broke with Jimmy Vaughn, who had been increasingly
pre-occupied with more commercial ventures. Anger moved to New York with his
rushes, and in 1973 edited a twenty-five minute version of Lucifer Rising, with
music by Jimmy Page. This was broadly similar to the present version, but lacked the
shots of volcanic eruptions, many of the special visual effects, and all the shots featuring
the character of the Adept. Vaughn?s company meanwhile went in to receivership. In
1975, Anger published the first English language edition of his book Hollywood
Babylon, and toured the US with a special film presentation to promote it. In 1976,
he returned to London, to extricate the Lucifer Rising negatives from the receiver;
while there, he publicly ?fired? Jimmy Page from his work on the soundtrack. Back in
New York, he prepared yet another version of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
(1978), this time with an Electric Light Orchestra soundtrack, and a seven minute version
of Rabbit?s Moon (1979). He then resumed work on Lucifer, with the aid
of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and released the present version in
1981. It carries original music by Bobby Beausoleil (interviewed by Truman Capote in
the recent collection Music for Chameleons), with whom Anger has been
corresponding ever since his imprisonment.
Reprinted by courtesy of Monthly Film Bulletin; this article was first published in MFB,
September 1982.
