Photo by Mark Berry

Kenneth Anger, Los Angeles, 2005

Courtesy the artist

Still from "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" (1954-66). Film, 38 min.

March 2009 Field Guide

Ellen Gallagher

Jerzy Grotowski

Nina Könnemann

Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussy

Christian Jankowski

James Coleman

The Collection

William Kentridge: Five Themes

Isaac Julien Jean Cocteau Doug Aitken Jean Cocteau Louise Wilson East London Looks East Doug Aitken Remastered

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Kenneth Anger — whose imagistic, low-budget movies often explored dream states and visions, as well as the clash of good and evil forces in the guise of gay bikers or angels — has long been hailed as one of America’s preeminent avant-garde filmmakers. Artists and film-makers such as Doug Aitken, Isaac Julien, Louise Wilson, and David Lynch have all cited him as an influence. This spring in New York, P.S.1 will offer a fresh look at Anger’s work when it hosts his first US museum survey in more than a decade. Organized by curatorial adviser Susanne Pfeffer of Berlin’s KW Institute, the exhibition will present eight of Anger’s seminal early films in an appropriately beguiling red vinyl room designed for the occasion.

Now 82 years old, Anger made his first prizewinning film in 1947 at the age of 20. Fireworks told the story of a teenage boy, played by Anger, pursued by a lusty group of American sailors. Hallucinatory and erotically charged, it ends with a close-up of a sailor’s pants, which he slowly unzips, pulling out a lit roman candle. As a youth in Los Angeles, Anger was an admirer of Jean Cocteau, and Anger’s oeuvre — about 30 films made over the past half century — reflects the elder auteur’s surrealist style. The biting, wounded prose of Lautréamont and Rimbaud exerted their own heady influence, but Anger’s most notorious devotion has always been to the world of the occult and the teachings of Aleister Crowley. In the campy romp Scorpio Rising (1963), a typical montage might feature a sunny, guileless Beach Boys song accompanying images of Nazi flags, Jesus, an animated skull smoking a cigarette labeled youth, and leather-clad bikers snarling down dark streets.

Although his films were strictly subterranean in appeal, Anger pioneered many film-making techniques that mainstream audiences take for granted today, including the use of a pop-music soundtrack and jump cuts. Martin Scorsese has called him "without a doubt, one of our greatest artists. " Perhaps his best-known film is Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), an epic hallucination of the decadence, kitsch, and spiritual vacuum of Hollywood. In fact, Anger’s obsession with Tinseltown has been one of his most defining themes — he is also the author of two incendiary volumes titled Hollywood Babylon, which revealed the sordid secrets of celebrities long before they did it themselves on reality TV.

ps1.org "Do Look Back in Anger" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.