Kenneth Anger attends the MOCA 35th Anniversary Gala in March 2014 in Los Angeles.
Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
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Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
Kenneth Anger attends the MOCA 35th Anniversary Gala in March 2014 in Los Angeles.
Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
Filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger was a legendary Hollywood figure, a visionary heir to an international avant-garde scene. But he also indulged in the vulgar and esoteric, practically disappearing from public view for nearly a decade before he died.
Anger’s death was reported on Wednesday by the Sprüth Magers Galleryrepresenting Anger’s work since 2009. Spencer Glesby, Anger’s artist liaison, told NPR that the filmmaker died of natural causes on May 11 in California’s Yucca Valley.
Born in sunny Southern California, Anger found fame as an irreverent chronicler of his shadows. He directed groundbreaking underground films for decades and claimed to have made his debut in the industry as a child actor in the 1935 production A Midsummer Night’s Dream with James Cagney and Mickey Rooney.
In 1947, while still a teenager, Anger made a short gay art film that earned him an arrest for obscenity. Fireworks, which has no dialogue, features men bending down for each other in a bar, undoing their pants, lighting cigarettes with lit bouquets of flowers, and a bit of surreal sadomasochism. Fireworks and Anger’s other experimental film are now revered as counterculture classics.
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The director of Rising Scorpio was also known to be fascinated by the occult. Kenneth Anger was a friend of the Rolling Stones, an enemy of Andy Warhol and the author of a bestseller. Hollywood Babylon, which spawned a sequel a short-lived TV series and a season of the popular podcast You must remember this. Many of his now-debunked stories are said to reveal scandalous secrets of dead movie stars from the silent and golden eras.
