LFP Magazine

Anthology Film Archives

The Anthology Film Archives is honoring filmmaker Kenneth Anger today as part of their 40th Anniversary Celebration at 8pm at the Hiro Ballroom at 88 9th Avenue in Manhattan. The evening will include a rare performance from Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler’s Technicolor Skull, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Now We Are Here, Jihae, the Virgins, Special Guests and DJ set by Moby.

History taken from www.anthologyfilmarchives.org:

Anthology Film Archives evolved from roots and visions that go back to the early Sixties, when Jonas Mekas, the director of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, a showcase for avant-garde films, dreamed of establishing a permanent home where the growing number of new independent/avant-garde films could be shown on a regular basis.

This dream became a reality in 1969 when Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas drew up plans to create a museum dedicated to the vision of the art of cinema as guided by the avant-garde sensibility. A Film Selection committee — James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney — was formed to establish a definitive collection of films (The Essential Cinema Repertory) and form the structure of the new institution.

Anthology Film Archives opened on November 30, 1970 at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Jerome Hill was its sponsor. After Jerome Hill’s death, in 1974 it relocated to 80 Wooster Street. Pressed by the need for more adequate space, it acquired in 1979 Manhattan’s Second Avenue Courthouse building. Under the guidance of the architects Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone, and at a cost of $1,450,000, the building was adapted to house two motion picture theaters, a reference library, a film preservation department, offices, and a gallery.

At the Courthouse, Anthology has found an ideal home as a chamber museum, dedicated to the preservation, study and exhibition of independent and avant-garde film. It is the first museum devoted to film as an art form, committed to the guiding principle that a great film must be seen many times, that the film print must be the best possible, and that the viewing conditions must be optimal.

The Anthology Film Archives also hosts the NewFilmmakers Screening Series, which I was fortunate enough to have two of my own films shown there, House of Women and Abode of The Serpent. This screening series is committed to showcasing films and videos often overlooked by traditional film festivals.

Bio taken from Wikipedia.com:

It is only logical that the Anthology would choose to honor Kenneth Anger as part of their 40th Anniversary Celebration. Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer February 3, 1927) is an American underground avant-garde film-maker and author. His short films, which he has been producing since 1937, have variously merged surrealism with homoerotica and the occult. Whilst he has produced almost forty short films in his lifetime, only six of these have received distribution, and have come to be referred to as the “Magick Lantern Cycle”. He has been described as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner”, and some of his homoerotic works, such as Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1964), were produced prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in the United States.

He has focused upon occult themes in many his films, being fascinated by the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley and following Crowley’s religion of Thelema. This influence is evident from films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1972). During the 1960s and 70s he associated and worked with a number of different figures in popular culture and the occult, including Anton Szandor LaVey, Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page. Anger has described film makers such as Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès as influences and has been cited as an important influence on later film directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and John Waters. He is also the author of the controversial best seller Hollywood Babylon and its sequel Hollywood Babylon II, in which he exposed many of the rumours and secrets of Hollywood celebrities.