Look Back At Anger

KENNETH ANGER: “I’ve always considered movies evil; the day cinema was invented was a dark day for mankind… My reason for filming has nothing to do with ‘cinema’ at all. It’s a transparent excuse for capturing people… I consider myself as working Evil in an evil medium… Afterall, Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts.”

ZACHARY LAZAR: “When Kenneth was ten, he began begging his father for the leftover ends of film from the home movies they made on their vacations. He examined the black Bolex camera, the riddles of apertures and shutter speeds, the light meter, the different filters for indoors and outdoors. He shot little fragments that evoked unexpected emotions: a few seconds of his sister brushing her hair with her fingers, or stepping out of a car in a long dress. He worked out scenarios in his mind, fairy tales involving kings and sorcerers and princesses, power struggles that ended not with a plot twist but an image: a candle burning on his parents’ dresser, a potted hyacinth on the kitchen table, a patch of sky between cypress trees. He found by accident that if he spliced together snippets from the family’s home movies – group poses at Yosemite or Big Sur – the images took on a different meaning, a lonely, distant quality, as if his family were strangers or dead. The images seemed more real than the moments they recorded. They made everything suggestive and strange, as if highlighted or outlined.”

STEPHEN DWOSKIN: “Kenneth Anger’s films are very rich. It is not that his dreams and visions are his alone, nor that his symbolism is different from that of other film-makers, the point is that he can take the obvious and present it in a symbolic way. He treats inner dreams and fantasies as the essential living being, in a way that makes others feel afraid. But he also presents his own fear, his inner self; the film becomes an act of voodoo, the transference of the inner self to form, a myth of its own, but existing openly.”

AMOS VOGEL: “Ken was a very complex and really unhappy human being, but that can make some of the best artists. There’s a lot of very interesting writings by Freud and some others that artists are people who can’t adjust to normal life. I’m not asking you to accept that, but I’ve found, in people I know, that it’s quite accurate sometimes. The most important way he dealt with his conflicts was through his films, through his work as a filmmaker. He could make the conflicts more manageable by putting them on celluloid.”

BILL LANDIS: “As a filmmaker, Anger emerged as the premiere artist from underground film. Through his ‘Magick Lantern Cycle’ he captured souls and revealed basic human truths within universal situations. Hermetic symbols that echo Jung’s collective unconscious are passed on into a broad pop culture sensibility. Even after repeated viewings, Anger’s films remain hypnotic experiences. Anger’s unique, jeweler-crafted imagery and exploration of the untold possibilities of cinema have left their imprint on directors who followed in his wake, including such extraordinary mainstream exponents as Martin Scorsese.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anger used a rich pancultural texture of myth to explain his own psychological condition in ‘Rabbit’s Moon.’ The rabbit in the moon is lifted out of Japanese myth, with the moon in Crowleyan terms representing the female principal. The character Pierrot was based on Crowley’s tarot card of the Fool, which meant divine inspiration in spiritual or creative matters, but folly, mania, or death in every day affairs. The highly stylized mime movements of the actors, which was part of early twentieth-century avant-garde theater, recalls both Kabuki and commedia dell’arte, where Columbine emotionally tortures Pierrot with Harlequin’s assistance. The set itself resembles the art deco forest of silver trees in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”

MIKITA BROTTMAN: “For Anger, cinematic projection is an actual ceremony… Anger believes strongly in what he describes as the ‘cinema of correspondences.’ He regards film as having the potential, when properly used, to invoke primal forces, perhaps even demons.”

CAREL ROWE: “The method of invocation relies on talismanic magic: the vitalization of talismans. Originally, these were drawn vellum patterns, sort of a shadowgraph print of the demon one sought to ‘capture…’ Medieval talismanic signatures were considered to be autographs by demons and Anger refers to them as printed circuits between physical and spiritual (or alternative) reality. He sees glyphs, hieroglyphs, sigils, pictographs, billboards, and especially tattoos as magickal marks on the wall.”

ANNA POWELL: “In ‘Liber 777,’ Aleister Crowley adapted the Golden Dawn scale of correspondences and royal color tables. This cross-references scales or series on separate planes. Planets are related to colors, jewels, drugs, perfumes, plants, magical weapons, sacred alphabets and the Tarot. Connected symbols may be combined to increase the occult dynamic. The actual use or symbolic representation of one item includes the dynamic force of a whole chain of connections. Anger regards magicians as ‘sources of energy that react on other inert objects in a chain reaction.'”

BILL LANDIS: “In thirteen minutes ‘Eaux d’Artifice’ lulls you into a trance with its calm, blue tint. It has the feeling of an intermission piece in the best sense, as was Rene Clair’s ‘Entr’acte.’ It’s one of Anger’s most tranquil works; his editing makes it soft, lush, and inviting. ‘Eaux d’Artifice’ remains a secretive romp through a private garden, all for the masked figure’s and the viewer-voyeur’s pleasure.”

MIKITA BROTTMAN: “Making movies was a way of casting spells in the form of ‘shadow prints.’ By combining the regular and the structured images of chaos (such as having the whole screen shimmer with glitter), Anger attempts to induce a state of hypnosis in the viewer, which will then leave them more receptive to occult signs and symbols.”

ANNA POWELL: “Anger refers to flash-frames or superimposition of magickal symbols as ‘trademarks’ for his product, explaining ‘these devices are barriers to the area of the mind that I want to block out: the Cartesian frontal framework. They’re keys to get through to the great Collective Unconscious, in which I totally believe.’”

GARY LACHMAN: “Renate Druks was influential in the late fifties, early sixties LA occult scene, her major contribution being her famous ‘Come As Your Madness’ costume party, that counted Anais Nin and Kenneth Anger as guests. In her diaries Nin recalls her costume: a leopard leotard with leopard earrings stuck on her nipples, a fur belt and a tropical jungle landscape on her back. A birdcage on her head was stuffed with rolls of paper carrying quotations from her books, what she called the ‘tickertape of the unconscious.’ Anger’s occult film ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ would be inspired by Druks’ event, which was one of the major psychedelic bashes of the time; Anger’s original title ‘Lord Shiva’s Dream’ (LSD) suggests as much. The film was shot in the weird, museum-like house of old-time Hollywood raconteur and occultist Samson de Brier, who would play Crowley in the film.”

BILL LANDIS: “Druks greeted the guests at the door decked out in a hat inspired by ‘The Merry Widow,’ a constricting waist cincher, and a black leotard. She carried two death masks on sticks, putting them to her face, whipping one off, then the other. This terminal kink costume was inspired by the sensuality and death obsession of Juan Guadalupe Posada, a popular nineteenth-century Mexican artist known for his portrayal of voluptuous females with skulls for heads. Mathiesen transformed himself into a negative of his being, dying his hair black, painting on a mustache, and cutting a male drag Don Juan figure. Burning incense wafted through the house, which was bathed in candlelight. Bare rooms became a forest, with branches and Mexican masks hung from the walls. The costumed guests intermingling made it all the more surreal.”

SPENCER KANSA: “Anger attended the party, cross-dressed in feathers as Hecate, Greek Goddess of the Underworld. Ensconced in an adjoining room, he waited to make his dramatic entrance bearing a lit candle. Unfortunately, busied with other guests, Druks forgot all about him, and when he did emerge, despondent, the candle had already burnt half way down. Anger told De Brier the masquerade reminded him of a dream he’d once had, and he captured it in a painting that hung on De Brier’s wall. Anger now aimed to recreate that masquerade on celluloid and bring his dream-painting to life.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anger frantically rearranged De Brier’s house. The furniture was carted out of his living room and replaced by Anger’s set pieces. Fanatical about cleanliness, he lovingly polished each object in De Brier’s bedroom. De Brier’s womblike, labyrinthine dwelling became even more so – black walls, gold ceilings, beaded curtains, a gold-painted Venetian backdrop. The colors were intensified by the use of gels on the floodlights. The primary group shots took an entire weekend.”

SPENCER KANSA: “De Brier’s home reflected his fondness for Art Nouveau décor, and velvet drapes, silken oriental robes, tiffany lamps and ornate objects d’art dominated. A collector of rare Hollywood memorabilia, he salvaged costumes and props purloined from long forgotten silent classics, and with the house kept in a permanent gothic gloom, it became something of a dark museum. One later tenant, the producer Rick Nathanson, remembered: ‘along with the film memorabilia, there were also portraits of Samson in the nude. It seems he had a portrait in the attic too because he never seemed to age.’”

KENNETH ANGER: “In the 20s, Samson had starred in the film ‘Salome’ as one of the boys… Samson was also rumored to be the bastard son of the king of Romania.  I’m not sure if that was true or not, but he liked people to believe that.  He had his own universe within his house.”

SPENCER KANSA: “Initially conceived as a vehicle to showcase Anais Nin, who had already made a memorable cameo appearance in Maya Deren’s ‘Ritual in Transfigured Time,’ Anger’s conception went out the window the moment he met Marjorie Cameron. Much to Nin’s chagrin, the film maker had found his new star. De Brier had taken great delight firing Anger’s and Curtis Harrington’s minds with the Jack Parsons/Cameron mythos, and according to legend on meeting the infamous Scarlet Woman Anger gushed: ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you for a thousand years.’”

CURTIS HARRINGTON: “I didn’t even want to know Cameron when I first met her because she had a very dark presence, very forbidding and intimidating. It struck me she was a bit mad, but we soon got beyond that. I’ve certainly never known anyone like her before or since.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Cameron thought she was a witch, and I’m in agreement with that idea.  She was what you might call a powerful woman.”

DENNIS HOPPER: “Samson’s personality was about as interesting as Andy Warhol’s. I mean, it wasn’t interesting at all, but if you didn’t go to Samson’s house, you weren’t really in Hollywood. It was like a baptismal rite in Hollywood. You were inside if you knew him. Why you were inside I don’t know. He’d give you coffee or tea and you’d wander through this sort of labyrinth of materials: drapes, cloth, and things draped over everything. He basically had a lot of old things, old clothes that actresses had worn, pieces of sets, maybe a cup that somebody used in a movie, stuff like that. He had a history at a time when Hollywood had no history that anybody thought about holding on to. It was like going to an antique shop, very cheap, sort of off the wall, very dark, mysterious.”

BILL LANDIS: “During his San Francisco excursion Anger sought out Anais Nin, who had just published ‘Under A Glass Bell and Other Stories.’ Nin was special to Anger not only for her diaristic writing – Anger himself was a personal and aesthetic diarist – but for having met Aleister Crowley. In ‘Incest’ she recalls Henry Miller falling under Crowley’s spell in 1934. Crowley, who was then living as a painter in Zurich, came to see them in Paris. He found Nin’s aura so powerful that he could not look directly at her.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anais Nin was a perfect instance of what Anger would refer to as elementals, people who in a Crowleyan sense incarnate the primal spirits of air, fire, water, or earth. They possessed a natural magnetism and power that was not self-conscious. Crowleyites believe that elementals in human form perform occult rituals whether or not they are aware of it.”

ANAIS NIN: “The reality and the madness mingled and that made chaos and confusion. The links were missing as in madness. There was a distortion. Love became hatred, ecstasy became nightmare. Those who began with a sensual attraction ended by devouring each other.”

KENNETH ANGER:  “The Pleasure Dome that they’re in is actually a prison.  I wanted to create a feeling of claustrophobia, that once you’re in there’s no escape: you’ll never escape from these people or this place.”

ANAIS NIN: “Cameron is surrounded in a vortex of evil which fascinates Paul Mathison, Curtis and Kenneth… At first Astarte illuminated in the film, shed her light but Cameron became a stronger figure as evil, a hypnotic figure and the mood of decadence won out.”

CURTIS HARRINGTON: “All Anais’ friends were quite disturbed and resentful. There was tension on the set, mainly between Anais and Cameron, because Anais being Anais, felt that she was the female star of the film. She considered herself a star in her own right, as an internationally known writer, and she could see that Cameron was taking over the production. Cameron was such a forceful presence that Kenneth kept giving more to her. Anais was more than a little piqued and jealous, so they were not on the best of terms.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Suddenly Anais shrunk in the majesty that was Cameron because Cameron wiped her out.”

BILL LANDIS: “In 1961 Anger stayed with Marjorie Cameron in a run-down part of Los Angeles. Stan Brakhage came by one day to visit. They were gathered in the kitchen when, much to Anger’s dismay, Stanton Kaye showed up uninvited.  Although irritated by Kaye, Anger remained gracious. Then Anger began making weird hand gestures over Kaye’s head. Kaye passed out in mid-sentence. Brakhage looked on, not knowing what the hell had happened. The conversation continued for another few hours. Kaye’s long nod lifted as Anger again did the hand jive over his head. Kaye awakened and finished the sentence he had started hours earlier. Brakhage was confused, remembered little, and wondered if he himself had been hypnotized into believing it had happened. “

SPENCER KANSA: “Cameron and Anger later came to loggerheads over the ownership of some Crowley manuscripts that had once belonged to Jack Parsons. Anger was holding onto the papers fearing they’d perish sooner or later in Cameron’s hands.  His bitterness unsated, Anger instigated a poster campaign titled ‘The Cameron File’ in which he denounced his former friend as the ‘Typhoid Mary of the Occult World,’ and promised accounts of the dead souls who had fallen in her wake. Offering documented proof of these allegations for fifteen dollars a pop, the poster was signed using Anger’s new sobriquet, Father Allahabad, bore the horned Devil of his Puck Press logo, and the whereabouts of his current locale, San Francisco.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anger put on a straw hat, grabbed his cane, and took ‘Hollywood Babylon’ on the road. Seven hundred curious individuals, mostly college students, showed up at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley to witness ‘The Hollywood Babylon Show.’ The aroma of incense knocked the audience sideways. Anger was onstage in his ‘Mr. Anger’ director’s chair. A too-tight, white double-breasted suit, a red tie, and a purple shirt rounded out his ensemble. The Kinks’ melodramatic ‘Celluloid Heroes’ played as Anger knelt before tacky icons of dead celebrities. At the end of the song he leapt to his feet. Like a mechanical toy that was too tightly wound, Anger raced back and forth, brandishing the neon violin that Mickey Rooney had given him from ‘Gold Diggers of 1933.’ Anger’s impromptu free-style moves ended with him screaming ‘THE SIDE SHOW!’ He dropped to one knee like Al Jolson and pantomimed Blue Magic’s smarmy falsetto soul hit, ‘Sideshow.’”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Anger would often appear without warning and then vanish just as suddenly. When Robert Fraser unveiled several all-white sculptures by his clients John Lennon and Yoko Ono, all the guests were told to wear white. Anger materialized in their midst – clad in black, of course – was spotted by Lennon, Yoko, Fraser, and half the guests, only to disappear. He later claimed to have been out of the country the entire time. On another occasion, Fraser, who stammered slightly, opened an envelope to find a razor and a note from Anger: ‘The final solution to your stuttering problem.’”

SPANISH TONY SANCHEZ: “On another occasion Kenneth came with Robert Fraser, me and a couple of other friends for coffee at a little club called the Costa Blanca, off Tottenham Court Road. We drove there in my Alfa Romeo and walked together to the bar. Kenneth was standing right beside me. ‘Five coffees, please,’ I said, then turned around to find that Kenneth had vanished. ‘Where is he?’ I asked. And nobody knew. So I went out into the street to see if he was there, and though there wasn’t a corner for two hundred yards in each direction, he wasn’t there either. Even if he had sprinted down the road like Mercury, he couldn’t possible have vanished so quickly. We didn’t see Kenneth again for another month.”

GARY LACHMAN: “In 1966 Anger moved into a house on Fulton Street in San Francisco. The Russian Embassy was a big, old Victorian number, overrun with bikers, drugs and magick. One visitor was a young musician who brought along with him a string of aliases: Cupid, Bummer Bob, Tophat, Snofox. By the end of the decade he would become infamous under his real name as he sat on Death Row, awaiting execution for the murder of a fellow musician. On 21 April 1970, the state of California sentenced Bobby Beausoleil to die in the electric chair for the brutal murder of Gary Hinman. Beausoleil had been a member of Charles Mansons’s Family; Hinman’s murder kicked off the bloody spree that ended with the Tate-LaBianca killings in the summer of 1969… Anger’s idea was that Beausoleil as Lucifer would represent the spirit of the coming age… At the time Beausoleil played lead guitar and sitar for the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, an eleven-piece rock ensemble formed by Anger to create the soundtrack to “Lucifer Rising.” Their partnership, however, was shortlived."

EVE BABITZ: “ People said Bobby was a narc and a thief, but I knew he wasn’t sophisticated enough to be either of those when I let him stay at my house once for a week with his white dog.  He needed someplace to stay, nobody would talk to him, and even though I didn’t sleep with him, he was beautiful and couldn’t help it that he was such a bummer.  He never understood anything and always asked the wrong questions.  He was so unable to understand anything and he shorted out so many trains of thought that people thought he was a narc.  He never took anything from my house when he stayed there, he even tried to buy food.”

KENNETH ANGER: “My first Lucifer proved to be a bit too demonic. He’s a remarkable person who made an unfortunate mistake.”

BILL LANDIS: “The house was a crumbling old affair and, as virtually every house was in the Haight at the time, was a shared living situation. Filmmaker Robert Patton resided on the top floor with Madeline Uribe, another tenant was in the basement, and Anger occupied most of the ground floor. Anger kept a small refracting telescope in a turret room. One woman who frequently visited the Embassy recalled bikers involved with magick and drugs hanging out. She found the place a ‘crystal palace,’ that is, a speed freak’s heaven.”

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL: “My space had real high ceilings, angel frescos on the ceilings. I loved the funkiness of the place. Kenneth lived in the back of the building. I lived in the front, which was originally the ballroom. Kenneth’s room was the only one that was decorated. He had painted his place purple, the walls were purple and the ceiling – there were window alcoves with faces of women in the corners. These round knobs were all around the ceiling; he had painted the strips black and painted the knobs silver so that it looked like studded leather. In the center of the room he put one of those mirrored disco balls on a string, on a thread, and trained some of his studio spotlights on the thing. He had painted the ceiling black, so the little silver balls would reflect the light from the mirrored balls and the room and ceiling would sparkle.”

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL: “I began going through Kenneth’s library and I began becoming familiar with mythology, which was fascinating for me. He had a lot of books, a lot of them rare. I became fascinated with children’s books and children’s book illustrations, starting with the Oz books. Their original illustrations have a lot of subliminal sexual symbolism. They’re instruction manuals for kids for learning about their own sexuality. They are! Of course, he had Aleister Crowley’s collection. He had a picture of Crowley over his bed… It was a turning point of sorts for me, as in the months following our initial meeting I was to become acutely aware of ways of looking at the world and of looking at myself in relation to the world that were previously dark shadows to me. I’ve studied mythology a lot since then. You’ll find that as you get into it you learn you’re aware of things – unconsciously aware of things. You draw connections. It’s almost like a racial memory.”

ALLEN MIDGETTE: “I met Anger and found him hostile and vulgar. He was the antithesis of what I read in Crowley. I’d read Crowley’s books and liked them, but I didn’t wanna belong to any societies. [Bobby Beausoleil] was a nice, sweet, young man, very gentle and poetic, who just sat there playing the lute, barefoot. I remember Anger knocked on Bobby’s door looking for him and said ‘Bobby if you’re in there you’d better come out or you’ll be excommunicated from the temple.’ They were living that high intensity energy thing, where people get it without speaking. Whereas, when Cameron and Anger met I walked out because I couldn’t handle the tension. Cameron liked Anger, but knew he could be a horror. He would be charming one minute and then change.”

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL: “Kenneth came into [the Equinox of the Gods event] at the last minute, like two or three days before we were going to do this. All of a sudden he gets involved and wants to help out… He was going to do an Equinox presentation, ushering in the Aquarian Age, and do a ritual. That was his plan. The night that we were doing it, Kenneth takes acid.  After the band was playing, Kenneth put on his own presentation. He was doing dance motions in one of these robes. He had a gold lame robe he’d actually made for me in the film. He had his eyes done up in the style of the Egyptians, the eyes of Ra. He was doing this sort of pantomime dance movement to the tape he had made. He was loaded on acid. The audiotape broke. He went berserk. He was freaking out. I mean, he just – POOF! His whole plan kind of just went out the window and just turned into a fiasco. There was a walking stick I always used. It was a cane I had found in a junk store, but Kenneth had it as a prop for this thing, using it as a wand or something. Flailing it around, he broke it in half. So he picks up both pieces and he throws them into the audience screaming, ‘I LOVE YOU!’ Ben Van Meter got hit in the forehead with one of those pieces. A quartz or one of his studio lights was trained on the scrim, it fell over and shattered into clouds of smoke.”

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL: “Naturally, I got the blame in Kenneth’s viewpoint. He stared coming up with reasons why I was not suitable for the film. The next day after the Equinox event, I went back to the Russian Embassy to get my stuff. He was gone. But he had come back long enough to do this little ritual. He put sheets all over everything. I didn’t know what it was. Obviously some sort of purging thing. I had this incredibly odd vehicle. It was a Studebaker cut in half with like a log cabin built on the back. It looked like half a spaceship and half outhouse. He had stripped  the thing. He’s got it all in the ballroom where I lived and it’s all locked up. He had my vehicle’s battery up on an altar. My response to that was, I broke through the double door into the room. I went in and got my battery. I got my instruments. I loaded up and then I split.”

KENNETH ANGER: “It’s like the old fairy tale in which the toad turns into the prince; I turned the prince into the toad. His dark side took over – with considerable help from Charlie Manson. Now, like the toad, Bobby sits in the well, in prison.”

ANAIS NIN: “Kenneth lived entirely in a world of his own. Who entered into it, who inhabited it, who did he love or trust or confide in?”

ZACHARY LAZAR: “The short film ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’ had its premiere at the end of 1969. The images rush by like a strobe light, rapidly intercut, sometimes superimposed: Mick Jagger’s face, Keith Richards’ face, the face of Bobby Beausoleil, a rock musician whom nobody would have heard of at the time. In the film, there is a violent merging, a trance, all of their images blurred into one. The filmmaker, an older man named Kenneth Anger, is shown conducting an occult ceremony while helicopters land in Vietnam; Hells Angels menace fans at a Rolling Stones concert; a nightmare begins to unfold.  Within months of the film’s release, Bobby Beausoleil would appear for the first time in newspapers in the company of Charles Manson – he had committed the first of the Manson murders. That same week, a fan would be killed by Hells Angels at a Stones concert at Altamont Speedway. The sixties would come to an end. An invocation draws forces in. It can lead to an evocation, which spits the forces back out.”

BARRY MILES: “The first Acid Test was held on November 27, 1965 at Ken Babbs’ place near Santa Cruz, a chicken ranch known as ‘The Spread.’ Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh from the Warlocks had been hanging out and talking about the possibilities of a multimedia show. ‘Why don’t we have one?’ said Babbs.  Allen Ginsberg chanted Hindu and Buddhist mantras, Neal Cassady rapped into an open microphone, Owsley supplied the LSD – clear Sandoz in red wrinkled capsules – and the Warlocks, shortly to become the Grateful Dead, played.  It lasted until dawn and everyone had a good time except Kenneth Anger, who left in a huff when someone suggested sacrificing a chicken.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Whitney Tower called and said that Kenneth Anger threw paint at Fred Hughes’ door up on 89^th and Lex again. He must think I still live there – he’s been saying I’m the Devil or something. I don’t know what his problem is.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anger participated in the massive March on the Pentagon. Other participants included various Diggers, Yippies led by Abbie Hoffman, and author/tough guy Norman Mailer. These groups intended to make the Pentagon levitate in protest of the Vietnam War. Well, Anger might have. Anger and Mailer had a shouting matched during it. The night of the march, Anger stood on the Diggers’ flatbed truck, screamed ‘OUT DEMONS OUT,’ set a pentagram aflame, and hissed and waved magic rings at reporters. A fresh tattoo of LUCIFER flamboyantly scrolled from nipple to nipple was proudly flashed for photographers.”

SHIRLEY BERMAN: “Kenneth is crazy, he’s a sweetheart but crazy.”

KENNETH ANGER: “[Lucifer Rising] is about the angel-demon of light and beauty named Lucifer. And it’s about the solar deity. The Christian ethos has turned Lucifer into Satan. But I show it in the Gnostic and pagan sense… Lucifer is the Rebel Angel behind what’s happening in the world today. His message is that the Key of Joy is disobedience.”

KENNETH ANGER: “I always type-cast in my movies. I try to use my friends, and I thought Donald Cammell and Myriam Gibril were ideal as Osiris and Isis, Isis being the force of life and Osiris being the lord of death.”

JIMMY PAGE: “The film’s pacing is absolutely superb. It starts so slow, and after four minutes it gets a little faster and the whole thing starts to suck you in… There’s a real atmosphere and intensity. It’s disturbing because you know something’s coming.”

BILL LANDIS: “More than any other rocker, Jimmy Page was fixated on Crowley. His millions afforded him the Great Beast’s Loch Ness residence, Boleskine. He would buy anything associated with Crowley, owning the second-largest Crowley library in the world. Page even had groupie minions scouring dusty occult bookshops in Hollywood for manuscripts. Crowley artifacts were occasionally up for sale. Anger turned up at Sotheby’s to check out who would be bidding. Anger was outbid at the auction by Page. Shortly after this, Anger began spending time with Page at his damp, creepy Boleskine castle. Page believed the place was haunted by the ghost of a headless man, and Anger was helping him deal with it.”

R. GARY PATTERSON: “The frightening legends that surrounded the estate scared off many would-be buyers, but Jimmy Page thought that the estate was perfect for his needs.  Kenneth Anger told of a heavy painting that seemed to just float from one of the walls and sit silently on the floor.  Anger turned to the other visitors in the house and asked if they had all witnessed this strange event.  The spirits were now very restless.”

JIMMY PAGE: “There were two or three owners before Crowley moved into it.  It was also a church that was burned to the ground with the congregation in it.  And that’s the site of the house.  Strange things have happened in that house that had nothing to do with Crowley.  The bad vibes were already there.  A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.  I haven’t actually heard it, but a friend of mine, who is extremely straight and doesn’t know anything about anything like that at all, heard it.  He thought it was the cats bungling about.  I wasn’t there at the time, but he told the help, ‘Why don’t you let the cats out at night? They make a terrible racket, rolling about in the halls.’ And they said, ‘The cats are locked in the room every night.’ Then they told him the story of the house.  So that sort of thing was there before Crowley got there.  Of course, after Crowley there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals…”

R. GARY PATTERSON: “After purchasing Boleskine, Page had Satanist Charles Pierce redecorate the home with mystical symbols in the proper manner for the new Laird of Boleskine.  The house obviously held many secrets.  It was claimed that Crowley had misplaced his ‘Book of the Law’ and that the work lay hidden for years in one of the darkened rooms.  In the residence Crowley was said to have summoned forth demons such as Thoth and Horus.  The house was constantly engulfed in dark shadowy shapes.  Crowley once mentioned that the rooms became so dark in Boleskine House during the middle of a sunny day that he had to use artificial light to aid him in the drawing of his magical symbols.  At this time, according to legend, the lodge keeper went insane and tried to murder his family.  One of Boleskine’s caretakers mentioned that Page would never spend the night in the dark house.  On one occasion while the caretaker was sleeping in one of the rooms he heard a sound at his door.  The heavy breathing on the other side of his bedroom door sounded like a large dog that wanted into the room.  First, there was a sound like claws scraping at the door and then a thunderous impact rocked the door and reverberated throughout the house.  The terrified caretaker stayed in bed and eagerly awaited the morning sunlight and the quietness that signaled the end of the supernatural attack.  One thing was for sure.  This was not the sound of cats playing in the antiquated hallway.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Lucifer is not the Christian devil, he is in fact the god of beauty and light.  The name Lucifer actually means ‘I bring the light,’ or ‘light-bringer.’  And for the Romans, the planet Venus, which heralds the dawn, was called Lucifer.”

NICK KENT: “[‘Lucifer Rising’] lasted for about half an hour and consisted of amateurish home-movie style footage shot by Anger of an extremely stoned Marianne Faithfull in black robes silently stumbling down a staircase holding a lighted candle.”

MICK WALL: “Far from looking ‘extremely stoned’ and holding a candle, Marianne Faithfull – in grey not black robes – casts a solemn, intriguing figure, as she wanders through the Egyptian deserts, dwarfed by the ancient monuments characteristic of the region. The rest of the film – a montage of visually arresting scenes and colorful images reminiscent of the surreal early films of Bunuel – is even more intriguing, containing snatches of real-life depictions of magick ritual, though it has been said that Leslie Huggins as Lucifer fails to cut a completely convincing figure; more ‘Carry On’ than ‘Rising.’ Donald Cammell is more in synch as Osiris, the God of Death – chosen for the role, Anger later claimed, ‘because he was always threatening suicide. And finally he did it. He blew his head off.’”

ZACHARY LAZAR: “In the Lucifer film, there is a scene in which a woman climbs a mountain in the closing dusk, a full moon overhead, clouds passing in front of it. Her role is Lilith, goddess of the unacceptable, the dying, the discarded. It is 1972 and, like Anita Pallenberg, Marianne has a heroin addiction that there is no reason to believe she will ever overcome, though she will overcome it, both of them will be all right. She forces herself up the hill, the gray light on her face, her hand at her throat, head down. When she reaches the summit, it is just before dawn of the winter solstice, the year’s lowest ebb. The sun begins to shine dimly on the rocks, casting a purple glow over the horizon, the hills below. There is a raised stone at the edge of the cliff that she stands on, a perfect circle cut out of its center. Every year on this day, at this moment, the circle’s circumference is entirely filled by the rising sun, the beginning of the new pagan year. She can hardly look at it. It’s been a long climb and she feels faint, nauseated, in need of dope. She raises her hands as directed, trying to embrace the sunlight coming in through the hole in the rock, but she looks almost repelled by it, her eyes narrow with censure. She used to be fascinated by things like the monolith – by magic, mysticism, fantasies of all kinds. Now there is physical pain, craving, no more idle wishing for life to seem more mysterious or important than it is. She sits down, half collapsing, bracing herself with a hand stretched out beside her hip. Her head hangs down from her shoulders, her black cloak twisted around her back. She closes her eyes and waits for it to stop and doesn’t move.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: "The Star Mountain sequence was to be shot last - and now I know why.  The Star Mountain is an ancient neolithic place of worship in Germany.  There are two hundred stone steps cut into the mountain.  When the sun rises on the solstice, the rays go through an aperture and hit a sacred spot.  We were filming on the morning of the winter solstice.  The sun was coming up.  There I was, dope sick, climbing the mountain.  When I got to the top I remember seeing the sun shining through the aperture and hitting the rock and then I blacked out completely.  What had happened, of course, was that I had run out of smack and had a slight dope fit.  I think I lost consciousness for a second and when I came to I realized I was falling off the mountain.  I came to as I was tumbling through the air and remembered in midfall that I had to do some somersaults and land on my feet.  Which I did.  They rushed me to the hospital.  They thought I must at least have a concussion.  But nothing.  So there, Kenneth Anger.  My magic was bigger than yours! (Kenneth would have liked me to fall off the mountain and die.  It would have been a magnificent climax for his film.)"

KENNETH ANGER: “Lilith is associated with the night, and with fog, and with divine discontent. She’s basically a powerful but unhappy creature. I gave Marianne this part to play because it was a kind of psychodrama. She, at that time in her life, was a rather unhappy creature, but in a theatrical way. Whenever she attempted suicide it was always with someone within range who could save her.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: "Lilith is obviously one of the great female archetypes, another form of the Great Mother like Ishtar and Astarte, Diana, Aphrodite and Demeter. From the point of view of the patriarchy, of course, she is the pure incarnation of evil. Lilith did not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so she never knew right from wrong."

KENNETH ANGER: “Marianne is one of the six women in my whole life that I have loved. Marianne has a strong streak of self-destruction. In some ways, she hated the part of Lilith, but when she got it all objectified, it helped.”

 

KENNETH ANGER: “That’s actually Marianne’s blood on the Art Deco scarf where I bound up her wrists after her suicide attempt.  She later gave me that scarf, which I keep in a special box… But some people have to act out things like that, you know, and they get through it and they go on with their lives, as she has certainly gone on with hers.  But she’s still a heavy smoker, and that will be the death of her.  I predict that.”

KENNETH ANGER: “We had a rather interesting time in Egypt.  Mosquitoes love Marianne Faithfull.  They would crawl up under her dress and bite her inner thighs, so she was our mosquito bait, because they wouldn’t bother anyone else.  She must remember that, if she remembers anything about it at all.  She was a very naughty girl about one thing.  She smuggled into Egypt a box of powdered heroin in her makeup box, which looked like grey powder.  Sometimes she forgot herself and powdered herself with heroin.”

MICK WALL: “Frustrated and dismayed by what he saw as Page’s flagging interest in the 'Lucifer Rising' project, failing to deliver more than 25 minutes or so of music, despite persistent pleas from the director, Anger immediately went public with his grievances, announcing he had ‘fired’ Page from the project and claiming he had been locked out of Page’s Tower House, unable to collect his belongings, chief amongst them, besides the film, his cherished ‘crown of Lucifer,’ studded with rhinestones from a dress once worn by Mae West.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Jimmy Page was a multimillionaire miser. He and Charlotte Martin, they had so many servants, yet they would never offer me a cup of tea or a sandwich. Which is such a mistake on their part because I put the curse of King Midas on them. If you’re greedy and just amass gold you’ll get an illness. So I turned her and Jimmy Page into statues of gold.”

NICK KENT: “Page claimed he’d contributed the soundtrack music and even helped finance the editing, but that Anger was unable to complete the work and had generally been mistaking the guitarist’s kindness for weakness. I wrote up Page’s comments only to find myself later having to confront Anger face to face. He turned up at the NME’s office demanding a right of reply. When one wasn’t forthcoming, he held aloft his right hand puckishly. ‘I just have to crook this little finger and Jimmy Page will automatically be transformed into a toad,’ he informed me with due theatricality. He was also strongly implying that he could do the same trick on me. But I was unmoved. That’s the one positive about being a homeless junkie: even witchcraft can’t intimidate you.”

GARY LACHMAN: “In 1976 Jimmy Page joined Bobby Beausoleil in the ranks of those Anger had turned into a toad. It wasn’t until 1980 that ‘Lucifer Rising’ finally premiered at the Whitney museum in New York. The soundtrack, ironically, was by Bobby Beausoleil. His life spared by a repeal of capital punishment in 1972, Anger had got back in touch with his original Lucifer after splitting from Page. Bobby had kept himself busy over the years, tattooing his upper torso, and leading a chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood – a pastime his old guru Charlie would have approved of. After Page had been turned into a toad, Beausoleil reversed roles, scoring Anger’s interminable epic from behind bars at Tracy Prison, California.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Even as inept as Kenneth was, I knew he was dangerous in a way. I knew that simply by being in his film, I was involving myself in a magic act far more potent than Kenneth’s hocus pocus Satanism. Smearing myself with Max Factor blood and crawling around on an Arab graveyard at five o’clock in the morning as the sun rose over the pyramids was absolute insanity. To be that passive, to let someone like that make me perform a ritualistic act of such ghoulish proportions, was just mindless… I used to feel a lot of the bad luck in my life came from that film… Pictures came out in the papers with me looking like death in gray makeup and a nun’s habit, with pyramids in the background. All contributing to creating a quite fiendish, devil-worshipping image of me… After ‘Lucifer Rising’ I ended up on the wall and became a junkie. I felt unclean and dangerous to the people I loved.”