Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger

"When I meet Walt Disney in hell, I'll kick him in the balls." --Kenneth Anger, as quoted by Bill Landis (238)

Journalist Bill Landis was a personal associate of Anger's in the early 1980s, but was no longer on good terms with him personally when this book was written a decade later. The "unauthorized" qualifier of the subtitle is sensationalist in a way that is hardly alien to Anger's own creative history. In the later chapters that involve or approach Landis's own direct interactions with Anger, there is some significant bathos.

Most chapters conclude with a scene-by-scene gloss (often shot-by-shot) of one of Anger's major films. Landis calls Anger a "great artist" (263) and justly lauds Anger's accomplishments as an experimental film show more auteur, tracing his acknowledged and evident influence on cinema in various markets and genres.

The book conveys the importance of Aleister Crowley's Thelemic occultism to Anger, and Anger's importance to late 20th-century occultists. However, throughout the text, there are rather hilarious misunderstandings of what "Crowleyites believe" (e.g. 68-9). Landis uses the word "ipsissimus" as a synonym for apex (14) in a way that makes it clear that he approaches occultist materials with a sort of recklessness regarding his own understanding of the terminology and phenomena.

Still, the book supplies solid and intelligible accounts of the various cultural milieux accessed and penetrated by Anger and of the personalities with whom he connected, both esoteric and exoteric. The narrative is very incomplete, inasmuch as the point at which it ends (just before the time in which I had my own brief and inconsequential firsthand meeting with Anger) was a full generation prior to Anger's demise. I don't know if the resistance that Landis describes (xiii) was given to later treatments by Anne Hutchinson and Jack Hunter, although those books purport to treat the work more than the man. As far as I am aware, Anger remains the only avowed biography of its subject. show less

One of the most important Thelemites of the mid-to-late 20th Century, Anger was a devoted fan of Aleister Crowley, and an acclaimed and influential filmmaker