ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party

RAC hosts a night-long screening of Kenneth Anger’s short avant garde films

- Erin Keane

August 11th 10pm to 1am, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix, 9 Clinton Street NY, NY 10002

I am excited to be able to host a Kenneth Anger screening at RAC. I have wanted to plan a screening embracing the extraordinary atmosphere of Kenneth Anger’s films ever since first viewing them a year ago in a film class. As intern at RAC I am finally given a chance to do so! Please join RAC for a night of biker gangs, Egyptian priestesses, the occult, sixties pop music, and libations provided by Culturefix!

Honored with an exhibiton at the MoMA in 2009, prolific filmmaker of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Kenneth Anger created a body of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most critically-acclaimed completed works in a relaxed ambiance with an informal seating area. Anger’s films center on and critique the dangerous allure of popular culture and Hollywood through their spectacle-based narrative structure. Visually, his pieces strongly draw on imagery from the occult, 70’s countercultures, and eroticism and are soundtracked by artists such as The Dells, A Raincoat, Jimmy Page, Elvis Presely, The Angels, Vivaldi, Ricky Nelson and the Shangri-Las. Self-described as a magician who uses cinematography as a magical power, Anger’s main goal in his filmmaking is to seduce the audience into entering an alternative construction of artistic realities and create an enigmatic atmosphere for the viewer that goes beyond the screen. 

Anger famously screened his films in his windowless apartment in the Lower East Side to a small community that included notable creative minds such as Alfred Kinsey, Mick Jagger, and Tennessee Williams, an experience he spoke about in an interview with The Guardian in 2010. RAC aims to recreate this intimate screening experience thirty years later in their Lower East Side location. With a gallery space, extensive beer selection, and communal tables with ample seating, enjoy RAC’s relaxed and social ambiance while viewing a selection of Anger’s most influential films.

Kenneth Anger (b. 1927, Santa Monica, California) has been creating films since the 1940s with his first being Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941). Anger’s six-decade-long oeuvre includes most notably Fireworks (1947), Puce Moment (1949), Eaux d’artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Lucifer Rising (1970-81)), Rabbit’s Moon (1950-79), Mouse Heaven (2004), Elliot’s Suicide (2004), and the recent Ich Will! (2008) and Foreplay (2008). His films have inspired contemporary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Anger now resides in New York City and continues to work in filmmaking.

Image: KENNETH ANGER, Hollywood Babylon, Neon and Plexiglass, 1975.