American filmmaker, author and artist Kenneth Anger has died at the age of 96. This is reported by his gallery Sprüth/Magers. Anger, born in 1927 in Santa Monica, California, was for decades the worst boy in all of Hollywood, a man who spilled every secret, was ready to scratch every image. And at the same time, he made himself very vulnerable – if only by the fact that, long before this was considered normal, he not only confessed to his homosexuality, but also made homosexual desire the subject of his short, not particularly expensive and not particularly popular films. Without concealing it with symbols and metaphors.
A celebration of the forbidden
However, Anger became world famous with a book and its sequel. !959, for good reasons in France, the first volume of the scandalous chronicle "Hollywood Babylon" was published, in 1981 the second volume was published – and a third, Anger has always claimed, also exists; but it could not be published because the people he made enemies in it were still too powerful. Not every one of the sex and crime stories from "Hollywood Babylon" could be verified; but what had been proven was enough to illustrate how little the clean, cheerful self-portraits of the film city, decorated exclusively with white, heterosexual and dirt-free sex appeal, had to do with reality.
But Anger was never what you call "independent" – quite the opposite: he was also a creature of Hollywood, as the grandson of a costume designer he was fascinated by the disguises and masquerades even as a child. Even if the story according to which he starred as a toddler in Max Reinhardt's film adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was an invention.
His own films, especially "Fireworks" and "Scorpio Rising," were celebrations of a sexuality that was not only homosexual, but flirted with danger and violence. And risked his own downfall – just as Anger, the director, was always willing to accept his own downfall. That's how he turned 96 years old.
It was he, at least he himself said, who inspired Mick Jagger to write the lyrics of "Sympathy for the Devil" with his penchant for the occult and the satanic. And if you look back on the past fifty or sixty years of film history, you can see that the aesthetics of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino are hard to imagine without Anger's influence.
So Hollywood Babylon has every reason to mourn.