American filmmaker and visual artist Kenneth Anger, whose experimental work “laid the foundations for late 20th-century avant-garde art,” has died at the age of 96, Spruth Magers art gallery revealed on Wednesday.
In a statement, without specifying the date and place of death, that art gallery referred to the disappearance of “a visionary director”, whose “cinematic genius and influence will mark all who encounter his films, words and imagination”.
Born in 1927 in Santa Monica, California, Kenneth Anger has been described by The Guardian newspaper as “a Hollywood legend” for making “some of the most disturbing, dazzling, crazy and influential films ever”.
Anger leaves behind about thirty films, all short films, produced between the 1940s and 2013. fireworks (1947) and Scorpio rises (1963).
Fireworks is considered “the first movie with a gay story produced in the United States,” writes Variety magazine, and earned Kenneth Anger a lawsuit, charged with obscenity.
Scorpio riseswhich brings together the themes of homosexuality, the occult, Christianity and Nazism, was particularly characterized by the use of music as the main element, because it lacked dialogue, as in most of his films.
The Guardian writes that this film is “capable of having one of the best pop soundtracks in cinematic history”, featuring musicians such as Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and Ricky Nelson, and that it “later encouraged Martin Scorsese and David Lynch to use pop songs. tell a story.”
Besides film, Kenneth Anger was also famous for the controversial book Hollywood Babylon (1959), which collected information about celebrity scandals in the entertainment industry in the first half of the 20th century, involving, for example, Charles Chaplin, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe.
For the Spruth Magers gallery, Kenneth Anger’s work “shaped the aesthetic of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, the visual lexicon of pop, music videos, and queer iconography.”
In 2009, Galeria Zé dos Bois, together with Cinemateca Portuguesa, in Lisbon, and the Serralves Foundation, in Porto, honored Kenneth Anger, in a program that combined a retrospective of the filmmaker’s work, an exhibition of visual arts, a conference dedicated to his work and a program of concerts.
At the opening of the cinema cycle, in May of that year, Kenneth Anger was at the Cinemateca Portuguesa to present the short films Lucifer rebellion, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Fireworks It is I Shall!.
Source: DN
