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"Images: Kenneth Anger. Sound: Mick Jagger." The albino lad's eyes flicker at the camera's lights, he ponders nude boys somewhere beyond the frame and wields a glass wand, greenish clothing suggests military fatigues and, sure enough, black-and-white flashes of soldiers dashing out of an helicopter follow. Skulls are bongs, Bobby Beausoleil's chest is a screen for a projected swastika. Anger in sacerdotal robes commands the stage under a crimson glow, the direct recording of a performance. (Scorpio Rising was also described as a documentary.) Superimpositions meld pupils and palms and forge a double torso with a dozen swaying limbs, a pyre receives a dead cat and Hell's Angels denim—the whole spectacle might be a casual night at Anton LaVey's pad, a stray shot catches a pooch yawning and stretching on the rug. Nabokov's oculus and Corman's The Masque of Red Death figure in this malefic, hyper-concentrated delirium, a grinning Lucifer and a self-incinerating generation of revelers sliced by kaleidoscopes and serenaded by a Moog synthesizer's groans. Shifting speeds and arachnoid prisms, thus the experience of a Black Mass or perhaps a Stones concert. The gang descends at last into a festive underworld, followed by a smoldering dummy in turban (Anger's own from A Midnight Summer's Dream?) holding a sign with the cinéaste's magick joke. "The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess." For a more pellucid suite of conjurations, one would have to go all the way back to Murnau's Faust.
--- Fernando F. Croce |