![]() ![]() Like the superimpositions that populate his films, these thwarted dreams of stardom, and an arrest as a teenager for homosexuality, form a skeleton key to his artistic sensibility, one preoccupied with ritual pageantry, menaced eroticism, and a melancholic child’s eye for playthings great and small. Years later, Anger would cling to a disputed (and now finally disproved) claim that it was he, rather than Sheila Brown, who played the Changeling Child in Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), though to look at a production photo one might still momentarily believe. As a boy, his costume seamstress grandmother imprinted him with glamorous and sordid Hollywood gossip, and brought him to his first double feature: the Al Jolson picture The Singing Fool and Sol Lesser’s recut of Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!. He was born Kenneth Anglemeyer to a middle class family in Santa Monica, California. Creative triumphs were stalked by catastrophe off screen recrimination, destitution, and death a persistent, buzzing cloud, as though brought down by one of the baleful gods conjured in the dazzling ritual spaces of his films. But eccentricity and anti-sociality plagued a personal life which – as auteur and artistic tyrant – Anger could or would not separate from his work. Few in the pantheon of American cinema’s mid-century underground made work of more consequence to popular culture than Anger, who rode the full pendulum swing of the 60s counterculture, and fused the romantic decadence of the European avant garde and the anarchic exuberance of postwar American youth culture into a unique and confrontational poetic signature. ![]() The end of the long, legendary life of Kenneth Anger (1927-2023) last month brings a sombre, if long foreseen resolution to the peculiar state of tension in which the film maker always seemed to exist with his public. ![]()
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