Crowley self-portrait, 1920
 
‘The Man We Want To Hang’ is a film shot by Kenneth Anger documenting an exhibit of Aleister Crowley’s paintings at London’s October Gallery in April 1998. The score is by Liadov.

I was amazed when I found this video. I thought I’d seen all of Anger’s films, but I was wrong. While it’s neither the trippy spectacle or erotic fetishism one expects of Anger, it still has moments where you sense the Anger ‘touch’. But mostly Kenneth steps out of the way and let’s Crowley’s paintings take center stage.

‘The Man We Want To Hang’, the title of the film also the title of the notorious Sunday Express article which had denounced A.C. as the “Wickedest Man In The World.” The title is also a pun on art being hung on gallery walls, and a possible reference to The Hanged Man of the Tarot—who appears in the film a few times—although nothing jumped out at me as I looked over that entry in The Book of Thoth to back up that line of thought (but I’m sure those with well wore copies of 777 and The Book of Thoth and a knack for undoing and uncovering occult puzzles may have better luck that I did ...)

The art works themselves—drawn of the collections of Keith Richmond, Jimmy Page and the Ordo Templi Orientis International—depict a variety of subjects. Simple landscapes of mountains, volcanoes and sea, serpents and malevolent beings from some daemonic reality, portraits of individuals familiar to those versed in A.C.‘s biography—such as Gerald Yorke and various Scarlet Women—and self-portraits of A.C., some evoking grey aliens or Lam.

If this was the only output of an artist they would have at most been a curious and obscure art historical footnote, if even that. But when put into the context of A.C.‘s life they have more value.

Throughout his life A.C. expressed his higher nature in a multitude of ways. Poetry, painting, ritual magick, sexual athleticism, writing, mountaineering, exploring higher consciousness. While he was middling in such expressions as painting and poetry, his non-fictional magickal texts are genius, a Joyce or Fassbinder of occult and esoteric philosophy, and most of us would be extremely lucky to create a single work of genius over a lifetime, let alone a multi-volumed network of texts like A.C.‘s.

Aside from his texts of magickal philosophy and ritual his other great work of art was his life, which encompassed the lowliest degradations and the highest and holiest exalted states. The art works provide a visual accompaniment to it—the settings, the personalities, the extraordinary experiences.

They also provide a reminder of A.C.‘s role as a prototype of the type of current creative spirit, with his multiple means of expression (poetry, art, journalism, adept, etc.) a forerunner of the of the typical artist of today, who is just as likely to write a novel, play in a band, star in a porn, run a small business, blog, than lock themselves in one monolithic way of expressing creative currents.

He ran a preview of this social reality movie like all successful intelligence agents do.” Jason Lubyk

 
Update: resident Crowley expert R. Metzger has informed me that The Man We Want To Hang is available as part of the Anger boxsets that were released a few years back. Available here.
Metzger also directed me to a film that Anger did on Crowley’s paintings called The Brush Of Baphomet, which you can watch after the jump…

 
Yet another example of a once super obscure cult film turning up on the Internet, in this case, for free on YouTube’s OpenFlix channel. The late Curtis Harrington’s darkly atmospheric Night Tide (1961) was the first film to star a young Dennis Hopper. The plot revolves around a sailer (Hopper) who has an affair with a mysterious and beautiful woman (Linda Lawson) who portrays a mermaid at a sideshow on the Venice Beach boardwalk. The sailor begins to suspect that his lover is an actual mermaid who commits ritual murders during the full moon.
 

 
Occultist/artist Marjorie Cameron, who memorably played the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Harrington shot Anger’s Puce Moment and appeared in Pleasure Dome as well) has a small but pivotal role as a super intense woman who seems to hold a strange and fearsome power over Lawson’s character. There is also a fantastic jazzy/beatniky soundtrack by David Raskin (who also worked on the soundtrack to Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin and composed the haunting theme to Otto Preminger’s Laura, which became a jazz standard).
 

 
While the Kenneth Anger / Jimmy Page dustup has been reported ad nauseum, this clip is new to me.

Led Zeppelin guitarist and leader Jimmy Page has been fired as composer for the soundtrack of the film ‘Lucifer Rising’ by it’s director, Kenneth Anger. Speaking in London on Friday, Anger decried Page for time-wasting and a lack of dedication to the project, and claimed that Page’s personal problems had made him impossible to work with. Page has been working on the film for the past three years and has so far delivered some 28 minutes of completed tape. The story of the collaboration -and the ensuing rift- goes back to 1973 when Page first agreed to compose and perform the movie soundtrack. He and Anger first met at Sotheby’s, at an auction of boots by the English Occultist/Magician Aleister Crowley. Both Page and Anger are students of Crowley’s teachings. Anger is a practicing Magus (a priest/magician) and his films’of which ‘Scorpio Rising’ is perhaps the best known—- are replete with occult symbolism. Anger himself describes them as “Spells and Invocations”.

See more animated GIFs after the jump…

 
We’ve sorta banned the word “rare” here at Dangerous Minds, because, let’s face it, nothing’s really rare anymore in the digital age. Nothing. Something might be “seldom seen” (we’ll be using that one a lot at DM) but “rare”? Nah, not in this century, bubbee. If there was ever more than two copies of something made, trust me, it’s out there somewhere in cyberspace, and can be located and downloaded with a little effort. Some of the seriously specialist “art house” and “cult movie” torrent trackers have shit so obscure and previously hard to find, that the word “rare,” especially when it comes to digital media just ought to be retired.

How rare or scare can something you don’t even need to move your ass off the chair for (and is normally free, for that matter) be???

It used to be that certain things were difficult to see, but no more. What about, say, the X-rated Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues. Once one of the rarest of the rare (at least for a watchable copy) during the heyday of the 80s VHS tape trading underground, you can now probably find close to 10,000 torrent files out there in the hinterlands of the Internet. It used to be on YouTube, for fuck’s sake. And again, it’s gone from “rare” to… ahem… free. Warhol films? That’s easy.

Whenever I’m trying to get across to someone new to the idea of what bit torrent has to offer and exactly what kind of cinematic rarities are out there, the example I usually whip out is Jack Smith’s campy, pervy underground classic from 1963, Flaming Creatures. How many celluloid copies of this film ever existed in the first place? We know that some prints were seized in police obscenity raids, but considering how few places there ever were, historically, to legally be able (and willing) to screen such a confrontational film—subterranean Times Square pre-Stonewall gay porno theaters is the answer—I’d wager fewer than five prints maybe? Flaming Creatures was the limit test case for a rare cult movie. Outside of some institution showing it, or snagging a personal screening as a film scholar at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, you could pretty much forget about ever seeing Flaming Creatures.

Until recently.

When Flaming Creatures and another of Jack Smith’s films, Normal Love, were posted on Ubu website, I recall thinking that the paradigm of “rare” was well and truly dead. Another legendary movie that I’d always wanted to see was the At Folsom Prison with Dr, Timothy Leary film, and that I was able to embed in a blog post here last week. Like I was saying, nothing is rare anymore and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
 

 
Which brings me to George Kuchar and Mike Kuchar, deviant twin filmmakers whose work also used to be difficult to view, but not anymore. The Kuchar Brothers were among the original indie mavericks of 60s cinema. But if you are thinking in terms of a young Martin Scorsese or Roger Corman, guess again. Troma before Troma, would be closer to the mark.

The Kuchar Brothers made silly, smutty, no budget, overblown melodramas and Sci-Fi epics that were part of the “Underground” film movement of the time.  Their nearest contemporaries were Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, but the space between a Douglas Sirk drama and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space would seem to nicely define the campy aesthetic continuum the Kuchar’s films exist in. John Waters claims the Kuchar Brothers were bigger influences on him than Warhol, Kenneth Anger or even The Wizard of Oz in his introduction to their (amazing) 1997 book Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool.

In a time long before YouTube, the Kuchar Brothers borrowed their aunt’s Super-8mm camera at the age of 12 and began making their films: poorly-acted, cheapo productions as much parodies as homages to the Technicolor movies they grew up watching in the 1950’s. The sweetly oddball Kuchar sensibility was also informed by the SF underground comix scene (via friends Art Spiegelman and Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith) when George ended up teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. George, the more prolific of the twins, has made over 200 films, mostly with the help of his SFAI students, with memorable titles such as I Was A Teenage Rumpot, Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof, Corruption Of The Damned, Hold Me While I’m Naked, Color Me Shameless and House Of The White People. His best known film is probably the short, Hold Me While I’m Naked.

Mike Kuchar, often in collaboration with his brother and his brother’s students, made films with tiles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Secret Of Wendel Samson and The Craven Sluck. He also made an amazing short with Dangerous Minds pal, Kembra Pfhaler called The Blue Banshee and collaborated with gay German underground auteur Rosa von Praunheim.

These days, rare no more, the films of the Kuchar Brothers can be purchased on DVD, downloaded for free from Ubu’s website and are posted on YouTube. There’s even a documentary, 2009’s It Came From Kuchar, which you can stream on Netflix’s VOD. Below, 1966’s Hold Me While I’m Naked:
 

 
Below, the trailer for Jennifer Kroot’s documentary, It Came From Kuchar:
 

 
The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar (Bright Lights Film Journal)

George & Mike Kutchar (Vice)

 
Rather astonishing news from the fashion and film world. Dangerous Minds’ fave filmmaker Kenneth Anger has released a two-and-a-half-minute film dealing with the fall/winter collection of the Varese-based house of Missoni, produced by filmmaker/Anger manager/Dangerous Minds pal Brian Butler and scored by French composer Koudlam.

Vogue Italia‘s Mariuccia Casadio provides some details:

A man of few words, this fascinating former actor who still takes care of his appearance first filmed the settings for his film “Missoni”: mostly locations near bodies of water in the Sumirago countryside and part of Rosita and Ottavio’s garden. For the indoor sequences, he built a set in the Council Room of the Sumirago Town Hall, a basement room with a vaulted ceiling. The mood of the film and the poses and movements of Margherita, Jennifer, Angela, Rosita, Ottavio, Ottavio Jr. and all other [Missoni] family members are reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates”, a 1968 film that inspired Anger to create his Chinese box-style storyboard.

Do yourself a favor and go full-screen with this one. And if you’re unfortunate enough to not be familiar with Anger, do yourself another favor and click one or both of the links below. You’ll be glad you did.
 

 
Get: The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 1 [DVD]
 
Get: The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 2 [DVD]
 
Thanks to Ian Raikow for the heads-up!

 
Jason Gelt posts at Brand X:

“The Alchemy of Things Unknown” exhibit intends examines individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred traditions and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Young’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the artists in this exhibition sought after or seek spiritual truths through art making.

Artists include Paul Laffoley, Harry Smith, Marjorie Cameron, Willian Blake, Austin Ossman Spare, Scoli Acosta, Kenneth Anger, Aleister Crowley, Zach Harris, Susan Hiller, Alfred Jenson, Angus MacLise, JFC Fuller, and Marilyn Manson.

Khastoo Gallery, 7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-472-6498

Image: “Kwaw”: an undated self-portrait by English occultist Aleister Crowley done in the 1920s, part of the exhibit at Khastoo Gallery through July 31. Courtesy William Breeze.

 
Last week’s Anthology Film Archives 40th Anniversary Blowout, Return to the Pleasure Dome, honored, naturally, the works of filmmaker Kenneth Anger.  Technicolor Skull—Anger on theremin (!), Dangerous Minds pal, Brian Butler, on guitar—performed that night (see below), as did Sonic Youth and Lou Reed.  Vice is carrying a stream of Reed’s 13-minute noodling performance.  Fans of Metal Machine Music Lou can check it out here.

 
What follows below are a pair of newly uploaded Rock Music Exposed clips from YouTube channeler, Triplexity, and were apparently culled from the two-part ‘89 documentary, Hell’s Bells (which, to my knowledge, remains in VHS-only exile).

The intro, clip 1 of 36 (!) and found here, lays out the Hell’s Bells agenda, “to help people understand the big picture, peel back the veneer of pop culture, and gaze into the bedrock of truth that lies beneath.”

Since it also hopes to serve as, “a wake-up call, an alarm warning of the fire raging just down the hall,” you can bet your salvation its earnest-but-porny-looking narrator means a “Christian truth.”  I know, sounds like a snooze.  We’ve seen—and smirked—at this kind of crap on numerous occasions. 

But readers of Dangers Minds might find far more compelling the below clips, 12 and 13.  In them, Hell’s Bells puts under the Christian magnifying glass Kenneth Anger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary and The Beatles.

 
The current Arthur‘s running a lengthy piece entitled, “Out! Demons Out!: An Oral History of the 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon and the Birth of Yippie!”  Dangerous Minds hero Kenneth Anger is just one of the many voices chiming in (Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, and Ed Sanders are others), but, judging from the snips below, the filmmaker’s bluntly amusing jabs might be hard to top.  Here’s his take on what it was like infiltrating the Pentagon:

There were a bunch of idiots there.  I didn’t consider myself an idiot, but maybe other people would. [laughs] There were these hothead lefties, who, their idea was they would take over and kill the capitalists.  Well, that’s not very practical.  Then there were Hare Krishnas, peacenik idiots, saying peace peace, or something like that.  I didn’t go for anything like that.  It was so annoying.

I just walked right in.  I had studied how the Pentagon staff were dressed, and I was just like them.  I wore a dark blue conservative suit.  I even had a small American flag on my lapel.  I was attacking Mars, the god of War.  He’s still our ruling god.  If you think Mars is an extinct thing from the antique past that we can just laugh at now, forget it.  Mars is still here.

I had a map of the Pentagon.  I went into every single men’s room and left—in a place where it was bound to be discovered, usually on the seat where anyone using that stall would have to see it, not on the floor, of course! —a talisman which was written on parchment paper, drawn in india ink.  Each one was drawn individually using one of Crowley’s talismans as my guide.  I’m sure no one in the Pentagon could figure out what this thing meant.  There was nothing like “War is bad” on it.  There weren’t even English words.  They probably could figure out it was something occult.  They know about those things, and they have a reference library.

I went from one men’s room to the next.  I didn’t stop until I had scattered all 93 of my talismans—because 93 is a sacred number for Crowley.  Then I walked out, it was all very inconspicuous.  The security guard looked at me and gave me a nice look, like we’re all looking after each other.  If I’d been stopped and put in handcuffs that would’ve been unpleasant.  That isn’t the way I want to spend my time in Washington—I had a ticket to the opera for later that week.

Won’t you now take some time out for a Puce Moment?

 
Attention New Yorkers, don’t miss Return to the Pleasure Dome, a benefit concert event for Anthology Film Archives with a Life Achievement Honor for Kenneth Anger.

Featuring Technicolor Skull (Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler), Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, The Virgins, Moby & other special guests.

Wednesday, May 19, 8:30p.m at the Hiro Ballroom, New York City, $99 via Ticketweb
 

Video: Kenneth Anger’s 42-second long film, Death. Part of the OneDreamRush project.

 
Dangerous Minds pal Brian Butler has a new short film that’s part of a film festival coming up in Los Angeles soon. Brian was a producer on the Disinformation series with me a while back, helming two of the show’s more memorable segments: the feuding Satanists and Rocketboy, the real life superhero/half cat. He also introduced me to Uncle Goddamn. Brian also contributed the great essay on Marjorie Cameron, Cameron: The Wormwood Star to my Book of Lies anthology. For these reasons and more, I shall be forever grateful. The video clip below is a shorter version of Night of Pan that was made for a Beijing arts festival, the full version will be shown at the Projections festival. It’s pretty striking, I think you’ll agree!

From the press release:

Brian Butler’s Night of Pan Premiers in LA at Projections Festival, January 16 at Roberts & Tilton

Los Angeles, CA: Noted filmmaker, artist and musician Brian Butler (http://www.brianbutler.com) will premier his short film, “Night of Pan” in Los Angeles on January 16 at 7:30pm at the opening of Projections, a festival of rare and hard to see films including other directors such as Spike Jonze, Harmony Korine, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Miranda July . Projections was curated by Aaron Rose an artist, film director, writer, musician, and independent curator most noted as the co-curator of the successful museum exhibition and book Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture which toured the world through 2008.

Projections takes place at the Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 5801 Washington Boulevard, between La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in Culver City, California from January 16 to February 20, 2010. In addition to screening on January 16, “Night of Pan” will also be screened in a loop at the gallery on February 18, 2010.

“Night of Pan” is a seven and a half minute film featuring film auteur Kenneth Anger and actor Vincent Gallo. The film has been screened in various versions internationally in Beijing, Lisbon, Cannes, Athens, Rome, Berlin and elsewhere, but never in Butler’s base, Los Angeles.

In the film, Anger, Gallo, and Butler depict an occult ritual that symbolizes the stage of ego death in the process of spiritual attainment.

Brian Butler is a multidisciplinary artist who creates works around dark magical themes. He had worked extensively as a producer on director Kenneth Anger’s recent work. Additionally he has written for Dazed & Confused and performs along with Anger in the band Technicolor Skull.

 
Vodka brand 42 Below is the creative sponsor behind One Dream Rush, a Beijing-based film festival of incredibly short films.  42 filmmakers from around the world were given 42 seconds.  The results from David Lynch, Dream #7, and Kenneth Anger, Death, follow below:

 
More on OneDreamRush

 
WARNING: what follows is a video for possibly one of the most insanely catchy songs of all time.  It Came In The Night, recorded by in ‘76 by Andy Arthur under his band name “A Raincoat,” ultimately came to serve as the soundtrack to the abridged version of Kenneth Anger‘s Rabbit’s Moon.

 
You can read more about the elusive Mr. Arthur here, but the shorthand goes like this:

Mystery man ?

Call me disputatious—or not, it’s entirely up to you—my favorite Stones album is Their Satanic Majesties Request. It’s the only one I play all the way through anymore. It sounds great as one great big, trippy chunk. It’s a great headphones album, too. Most Stones fans hate it and see it as a weak attempt to out weird the Beatles after they’d unleashed Sgt Pepper on the world, but to me, it’s just a thing of beauty, with the normal Blues-based Stones sound thrown out the door, and replaced with a colorful sonic palette the likes of which they would never return to. I’m not saying that it IS the best Stones album, I’m just saying it’s MY favorite. (My favorite Stones song, is Monkey Man, followed by Stray Cat Blues, then (Doo Doo Doo Doo) Heartbreaker, dark horses, all, I grant you. I’m also partial to Don’t Know Why I Love You, but the Glimmer Twins didn’t write that one, so it doesn’t count).

If you ask me, the Stones “demonic” phase, inaugurated, if you will, by their association with the Magus of Cinema, Kenneth Anger, was when the Stones were truly on fire. Mick was still quite into his Satan/Lucifer thing well into the Let It Bleed/Gimme Shelter era, but after Altamont, Jagger was often seen wearing a crucifix around his neck, perhaps seeking to put down all the hoodoo Age of Horus energy he’d raised? Have sympathy for the poor devil. Jagger had a current running through his body during the Sixties that killed quite a few of his contemporaries. Today, like a rock and roll Dorian Gray, he hardly looks any worse for the wear.

Here is a seldom seen pop video for 2000 Light Years From Home. It seems so heavily influenced by Kenneth Anger that I always assumed that he’d directed it, but it seems more likely to be the work of photographer Michael Cooper, who not only shot the cover for the Satanic Majesties album jacket (which was originally issued with a fantastic 3-D lenticular cover (I have one!), but Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising film as well. I had a copy of this on a Japanese laser disc, comically followed by a clip of Pete Townsend in full Mod drag sternly criticizing the Stones for their then recent marijuana busts. (It’s always the bluenoses who have the really outrageous vices, isn’ it?). Other than that, I’d never seen it anywhere, but here in the YouTube era (we’re living in the YouTube era, didn’t anyone tell you this?) some kind soul has liberated it for our viewing pleasure. Take a look, it’s great:

The Rolling Stones and Satanism