Kenneth Anger, 96, Dies; Experimental Filmmaker Left a Pop Culture Legacy

Kenneth Anger, a baby of Hollywood who turned one of the vital necessary experimental filmmakers of his technology and whose affect can nonetheless be felt in common visible tradition, from motion pictures to music movies, died on May 11 in Yucca Valley, Calif., a city bordering Joshua Tree National Park. He was 96.

His dying, at an assisted dwelling heart, was confirmed on Wednesday by Spencer Glesby, a spokesman for Sprüth Magers, a gallery that has represented Mr. Anger since 2009. He stated an announcement of the dying had been delayed whereas issues involving Mr. Anger’s property had been being put so as.

Mr. Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground artwork and mass tradition. Few different avant-garde filmmakers borrowed so liberally or so subversively from common iconography. And together with his sensuous, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, maybe none noticed their work so readily absorbed again into the mainstream.

Mr. Anger’s best-known movie, “Scorpio Rising” (1963), a fetishistic take a look at a gang of Brooklyn bikers with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop hits — sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles and Little Peggy March, amongst others — proved that sound and picture could possibly be mixed to create one thing stronger than the sum of their components. It is broadly thought of a precursor of the music video, and its affect might be felt in motion pictures as various as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” (The Bobby Vinton hit that gave the Lynch movie its title can be heard in “Scorpio Rising.”)

Hailed in his later years as a progenitor of remix tradition, Mr. Anger prided himself on being an outsider who belonged to no specific motion. Asked in 2004 about his stature as a godfather of queer cinema, he responded, “I don’t like being put in a cubbyhole.”

He was comfy within the firm of the well-known. His acquaintances, a few of whom collaborated with him, included the poet and artist Jean Cocteau, the playwright Tennessee Williams, the intercourse researcher Alfred Kinsey, the author Anaïs Nin and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

But he additionally scandalized the celebrated in his lurid tell-all e book, “Hollywood Babylon.” That e book, rife with Tinseltown scandals and rumors concerning the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino — Mr. Anger’s grandmother was a wardrobe mistress in silent movies — was first printed in France in 1959 and broadly bootlegged earlier than its official publication within the United States in 1975.

Mr. Anger’s popularity as a filmmaker rested on a comparatively small physique of labor: 9 brief, wordless movies, totaling underneath three hours and made between 1947 and 1972, that got here to be generally known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, like “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965), had been fragments of longer works that had been by no means completed for lack of cash. Mr. Anger usually deserted and restarted tasks, and he typically revised his movies and introduced barely modified variations of them.

He was intrigued by the interaction of historic myths and popular culture. Several of his movies concurrently painting and enact rituals, utilizing sound and modifying to create trancelike, incantatory works, reminiscent of “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), which depicts a celebration whose friends are dressed as pagan deities. Mr. Anger likened the making of a film to the casting of a spell.

Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer was born on Feb. 3, 1927, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Wilbur and Lillian (Coler) Anglemyer. His father was {an electrical} engineer at Douglas Aircraft. Many particulars of his biography as he instructed it — very like the scandalous tales in “Hollywood Babylon” — are exhausting to corroborate. (He claimed to have had the position of the younger prince within the 1935 film “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” although Mickey Rooney, a star of the movie, stated the half was performed by a lady.) He stated he began making movies as a baby.

Mr. Anger’s earliest surviving movie, “Fireworks” (1947), made when he was 20, is a cinematic landmark in each type and content material: a dreamlike psychodrama and an autobiographical coming-out film, shot in his mother and father’ home whereas they had been away for a funeral. Mr. Anger seems in it as a younger man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a gaggle of musclebound sailors, considered one of whom undoes his pants to disclose a Roman candle.

According to Mr. Anger, the friends on the movie’s first screening included Alfred Kinsey, who he stated purchased a print of “Fireworks” for his assortment, and the filmmaker James Whale, greatest recognized for “Frankenstein.” In 1950, inspired by an admiring letter from Jean Cocteau about “Fireworks,” Mr. Anger moved to Paris, the place he spent a lot of the next decade and labored as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.

Mr. Anger accomplished one movie throughout his time in Europe: “Eaux d’Artifice” (1953), shot within the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. The footage for an additional, “Rabbit’s Moon,” which options characters from the commedia dell’arte theater custom, was left within the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française for 20 years; two variations of the movie had been launched within the Nineteen Seventies.

He shot “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” whereas on a go to dwelling to Los Angeles. With financing exhausting to come back by, he supported himself by writing “Hollywood Babylon.”

Back within the United States within the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Anger entered a productive section that resulted in a few of his most admired works. “Scorpio Rising,” one of many best-known experimental motion pictures of all time, reveals leather-clad bikers tending to their bikes, fueling a raucous Halloween occasion and desecrating a church. Mr. Anger included provocative juxtapositions: Nazi imagery and excerpts from a life-of-Jesus film.

The supervisor of a Los Angeles theater that confirmed “Scorpio Rising,” which incorporates frontal nudity, was arrested on an obscenity cost, and an indecency case in opposition to the movie went to the California Supreme Court, which dominated in Mr. Anger’s favor.

As the counterculture motion crested within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Anger moved to San Francisco, the place his associates included Anton LaVey, the founding father of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who turned a member of the so-called Manson household.

Mr. Anger spent a lot of this era creating and taking pictures a challenge known as “Lucifer Rising,” which envisioned Lucifer not because the satan however as a god of sunshine and “the patron saint of movies,” as Mr. Anger put it. A disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, Mr. Anger referred to cinema as an “evil force.” He had the identify Lucifer tattooed on his chest.

Much of the unique footage of “Lucifer Rising” was stated to be misplaced — Mr. Anger accused Mr. Beausoleil, who performed Lucifer, of stealing it — however some salvaged materials made its method into the orgiastic “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969), which contains a synthesizer rating by Mick Jagger.

Completed in 1972 and revised a number of instances, “Lucifer Rising,” with its theme of rebirth, stands in distinction to Mr. Anger’s death-obsessed work of the earlier decade. Mr. Beausoleil, by then serving a life sentence for homicide, wrote the rating from jail.

The movie concluded the Magick Lantern Cycle, and afterward Mr. Anger withdrew virtually completely from filmmaking for about 20 years. He printed “Hollywood Babylon II” in 1984, however this was in any other case a interval of relative inactivity for Mr. Anger, although it coincided with the arrival of the music video and the rise of quick-fire modifying in mainstream cinema, and he got here to be acknowledged for his affect on each.

Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Mr. Anger’s volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Friendships and collaborations had been recognized to finish with Mr. Anger threatening to place a curse on the offending occasion, as occurred with Mr. Beausoleil and the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was initially employed to provide the “Lucifer Rising” rating.

Mr. Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, producing a flurry of brief movies, together with “Mouse Heaven” (2004), concerning the cult of Mickey Mouse; “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007), an elegy to the singer Elliott Smith; and “Ich Will!” (2008), a brief assembled from archival footage of the Hitler Youth motion. The essential response to the brand new work was usually lukewarm, and the main target remained on his earlier motion pictures. The Magick Lantern works have been issued on DVD in restored variations and put in in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.

Mr. Anger left no quick survivors. Before shifting to the assisted dwelling facility, he lived in Los Angeles.

In an essay for a 2007 DVD launch, Martin Scorsese extolled the poetic rhythms of Mr. Anger’s movies and what he known as their “inevitable” logic.

“The structure, the form, the feel of these films,” Mr. Scorsese wrote, “appears to be less invented than received from a source hidden from the rest of us.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.