When Fantoma issued "The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One" at the start of the year, serious film fans rejoiced. Even the Village Voice enthused, "The latest blast from the avant-garde cannon … arrives this week on DVD in a terrific package."
Now, the second DVD installment has arrived with five more Anger films, made from 1964 to 1981, and like its predecessor, it boasts stellar transfers, commentaries, a thick booklet and more. There is also another essay from Martin Scorsese drooling over Anger's edgy films and an essay by Gus Van Sant, too.
The first two films are stylistic bedfellows. "Scorpio Rising," from 1964, and Kustom Kar Kommandos, from the following year," focus on motorcycle and hot rod fetishists. They are all polished chrome, studded leather and lingering shots on rugged dungareed crotches; overlaid with sugars girl group pop music. He's capturing a fading era.
Jump ahead to 1969's "Invocation of My Demon Brother," with its wheezing bleep of a soundtrack by Mick Jagger, and Anger again is influenced by his time, even if the psychedelic visuals of the film were arguably becoming a bit dated by then. Here, too, is where the suggested sexuality, simmering just below the surface in the first two films, exposes itself with shots of naked men lounging about and, later, wrestling.
Clearly always influenced by current trends, Anger went "No Wave" for 1981's "Rabbit's Moon" – based on kabuki tradition -- with its new wave disco soundtrack (think Marianne Faithfull's "Broken English") and the blue and white moonlit fable starring a Klaus Nomi-like Pierrot the clown, Columbina and a harlequin.
Finally, "Lucifer Rising," perhaps the Anger film with the most controversy surrounding it. The story of its making is the story of a stolen film, a soured soundtrack collaboration with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and a replacement soundtrack recorded in prison by Manson family associate Bobby Beausoleil. Oh yes, and at least one lawsuit.
Anger's interest in fetishism, the occult and folk like Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey come to the fore in the films, which at times conjure the work of Pasolini in their explicit sexuality and their historical settings.
If these are not the equivalent of an evening spent watching "Extras" episodes and outtakes on DVD, that's OK, they're not meant to be. What this DVD and its companion do, honorably and respectfully, is document the work of one of America's most interesting avant-garde filmmakers.
"When I watch these remarkable films," writes Scorsese in the booklet, "the world as it was when I first saw them is transformed into essences: essential dangers, essential beauties, essential mysteries."
