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Lava at dusk, Bobby Beausoleil's guitar feedback swelling like acid Bartók, the foundation of Kenneth Anger's savagery of wit. He makes himself at home in the land of pharaohs, filming with a magick eye in the manner of Die Nibelungen. Isis (Myriam Gibril) lounges by the hieroglyphs, a Méliès cut introduces Osiris (Donald Cammell) amid statues, scepter raised to stormy skies. Their progeny (Haydn Couts) is roused from his sarcophagus to do his morning killing before retiring to a bathtub, his victim (Marianne Faithfull) awakens in the primeval Celtic forest with blue skin, perhaps the very Lilith about whom Wagner composed. Pyramids and Stonehenge fuse to herald the Fallen Angel, Nature meanwhile has its own cycles to tend to (a crocodile slithers out of an egg, a cobra is crushed under an elephant). Ancient monuments and faddish players, a crescendo most arcane. The jokes are profuse and devastating—the High Priest (Chris Jagger) in the darkened room that opens to a crimson glow, a triangle tagged "Trade Mark" filling the screen, Cammell painted Wicked Witch-green and clasping sacramental figurines like fingers. Anger as the Magus may spin madly inside a drawn circle, but his grasp of operatic image-forging was never more assured. Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou, Alexeieff and Parker's Night on Bald Mountain, Powell's Herzog Blaubarts Burg... The camera tilts up from the Goddess of Love to the Sphinx looming behind her, the spectacle concludes with solarized alien plates, zipping by on their way to Liquid Sky. "The subject requires no explanation," Aleister Crowley's words assure the audience. With Jimmy Page as "Man Holding Stèle of Revealing."
--- Fernando F. Croce |