Artforum International

KENNETH ANGER was an audacious filmmaker, a self-proclaimed magus, a never-closeted queer, a shameless scandalmonger, a sometime Satanist, a difficult person, and, as P. Adams Sitney put it, the "conscious artificer of his own myth." He was also the King of Pop—at least that's what I thought on first seeing Scorpio Rising (1963) in the mid-1960s, age sixteen, at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

There were other movies on that program; I remember being impressed by Gregory Markopoulos's Ming Green and Ed Emshwiller's Relativity. But Scorpio Rising blew everything else away: the enameled Kodachrome-on-Kodachrome color, the deadpan sacrilege, the quotations from comic strips and Mad magazine, but mainly the music. Scorpio Rising was wall-to-wall AM radio, all but one of its twelve songs a Top 40 hit between May 1962 and September 1963, exactly the junior high school period when I received nightly transmissions from Murray the K's "Swingin’ Soiree." I didn't necessarily love the songs, but I knew them in my bones.

The more venturesome members of the art world didn't need to meet the Beatles or even the Supremes to hip them to Top 40. The likes of Tony Conrad, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ivan Karp, and Wynn Chamberlain were venturing out to downtown Brooklyn to dig Murray the K's fantastic shows at the 4,000-seat Fox Theatre. (Years before the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the K was deploying to the strobe!) Anger, however, was the first to put teenage moron music in a movie.

Its fate sealed by the generational horror of American Graffiti, Scorpio inevitably became nostalgic. Now that "My Boyfriend's Back" gave its title to a Sandy Duncan vehicle, "Hit the Road Jack" has been used to sell auto insurance, and Whoopi Goldberg covered "I Will Follow Him" in Sister Act, it's ancient history. But the point for me, back in the mid ’60s, was not recognition but revelation: sound and image, Susan Sontag's "radical juxtaposition"! (Not until I saw Godard's 1967 Two or Three Things I Know About Her a few years later would I so viscerally get the essence of montage.) The music made stuff happen. The spectacle of clueless hitter types getting into biker drag while Bobby Vinton crooned "she wore blue velvet" or Jesus entering the frame as the Crystals sang "He's a Rebel" cracked me up. Still do.

Anger is a central figure in my sense of movie history. (Having discovered the original paperback Hollywood Babylon in a Times Square used magazine store, I committed it to memory along with Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema.) He reliably inserted himself into cinema's margins. The once-scandalous Fireworks (1947) could serve as a short subject with, if not an inspiration for, Cocteau's Orphée (1950); the unfinished Puce Moment (1949) is the real Sunset Boulevard. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is a perverse riff on the biblical spectacles of the 1950s; Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) should preface every screening of Easy Rider (1969), to mention only one of the movies that crawled from beneath Scorpio's leather jacket. Nothing gets the insanity of the late ’60s more convincingly than Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) or the ascendence of total animation more entertainingly than Anger's late in life, rarely seen Mouse Heaven (2004).

A legendary figure in avant-garde film circles, Anger returned to the United States in 1962 after a decade in Paris, moving to New York, where he stayed at the Brooklyn Heights apartment of filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas. "It was like visiting a foreign country," he later recalled. "Brooklyn was as strange to me as darkest Africa." Cruising the Coney Island boardwalk, he discovered a gang of motorcyclists hanging out by the Cyclone and was inspired to make a documentary portrait. (They accepted him as a camera nut.)

With its mock-heroic vision of urban youth culture, knowing homoeroticism, copious media quotations, and blasphemous juxtaposition of Hitler and Christ, Scorpio Rising was an instant sensation. Jonas Mekas called it "poisonously sensuous" and, having lived as a youth under German occupation, saw something more: "The pull of fascist strength, muscle and steel and speed." Fun fact: The same night that Scorpio Rising had its 2 AM "sneak preview," Andy Warhol screened the first installment of his "serial" Kiss. It also materialized a few months after that other deranged document of depravity, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures.

Smith and Anger were different types. Anger collected Rudolph Valentino memorabilia; Smith worshipped Maria Montez. Anger thought of his films as burnished jewels; Smith proudly used trash. Although a postcard from Anger was discovered in Smith's "archives," it's hard to imagine them being geniuses together for more than five minutes. (I note in passing that neither divo had the guts to put the irrepressible Taylor Mead in a film.) If Flaming Creatures was the most influential of underground movies, Scorpio Rising was the most popular.*

Both movies drew on Hollywood, pop music, and drag. Both were steeped in subculture. Both were busted days apart, on opposite coasts, for the same thing—male frontal nudity, pretty much in your face. Anger, who did not lack a sense of humor, would claim that he was sued by the American Nazi Party for desecrating the swastika! Speaking of phallocratic fascism, I would love to see the pea-brained would-be Mussolini who governs Florida attempt to parse Anger's legendary assertion that the only devil he ever worshipped was Mickey Mouse.

J. Hoberman is still pondering the 1960s . . .

*I worked at the Film-makers Cooperative during the summer of 1970 cleaning films and shlepping them to the post office: There were something like twelve prints of Scorpio Rising in constant demand from college film societies and Madison Avenue ad agencies. (Michael Snow's Wavelength ranked second, with six prints.)