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The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger

The title comes from a newspaper headline, one of many that the tabloid press bestowed on occultist Aleister Crowley whilst titillating their readers with lurid descriptions of orgies and Black Masses throughout the 1920s. Before the Second World War it was still possible to label a self-aggrandising magus “The Wickedest Man in the World”. If only they knew what was coming…

The picture above is a still from Kenneth Anger’s 2002 film of Crowley’s paintings which you can see in two parts at YouTube. The paintings were filmed in exhibition at the October Gallery in 1998 and Anger turns the original tabloid headline around by making the “hang” refer to hanging a painting. Crowley’s crude artwork often turns up in books but there are several pictures in the film I hadn’t come across before. Crowley’s depiction of the Himalayas, where he spent some time mountaineering, look very similar to those of Nicholas Roerich, the painter whose work HP Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. It would have been nice to have some more information about the pictures but that’s not Anger’s style.

• The Man We Want to Hang pt 1 | pt 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Austin Osman Spare

Strange cargo: things found in books

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).

One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The Other Andrew’s page concerned book inscriptions, something any book collector will be used to seeing. Less common are the objects which slip from the pages when you’ve returned home. There are several categories of these.

1: Bookmarks

I have a substantial collection of bookmarks proper, from embossed strips of leather to the more mundane pieces of card of the type that bookshops frequently give away. But I also make a habit of using odd inserts to mark a place as did the previous owners of these volumes. The City Lights book (above) came with a very fragile leaf inside it which may well be as old as the book. Another City Lights book I own, the Artaud Anthology from 1965, included a newspaper article about Artaud. Newspaper clipping inserts are discussed below.

Continue reading “Strange cargo: things found in books”

A Jihad for Love

A Jihad for Love
New documentary about gay Muslims.

Relighting the Magick Lantern

The first part of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle appeared on DVD in a splendid edition from Fantoma earlier this year. The second and final part is due for release on October 2nd and you can see the mouthwatering trailer here.

This new set includes the Cocteau-esque Harlequinade, Rabbit’s Moon (1950); homoerotica, bikers and rock’n’roll in Scorpio Rising (1964); a hot rod, a blond boy in tight pants and the Paris Sisters crooning Dream Lover in Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965); magick ceremonies and Mick Jagger playing with a Moog synth in Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969); and Donald Cammell, Marianne Faithfull, Egypt, volcanoes, Aleister Crowley, an orange UFO and a great score from Bobby Beausoleil in the miniature epic, Lucifer Rising (1982).

The Magick Lantern Cycle is a great work of cinema that’s suffered from shoddy presentation on previous video releases; Fantoma have given these films the care and attention they deserve. If you haven’t seen them yet, you’re in for a treat.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• James Bidgood
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker

Before the Law from The Trial (1962).

I’d wanted to write something about this pair of animators last year but at the time there was none of their work available for online viewing. This situation has now been remedied thanks to the ubiquitous YouTube.

This is Kafka-related once again since most people have seen Alexeieff/Parker’s work—if at all—in the prologue they provided in 1962 for Orson Welles’ film of The Trial. Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian illustrator and animator who met Claire Parker, an American art student, in Paris in 1930. The pair formed a life-long partnership and together developed a new style of animation using a pinscreen, a white board containing thousands of pins whose shadows when pushed out of the board provide the grey tones required to create a picture. At the time they began working with this most animation was flat and cartoony; the pinscreen enabled them to create the kind of subtleties of shading seen in pencil and ink drawing. Many of the effects they created are stunningly lifelike.

The prologue for The Trial is a pictorial rendering of Kafka’s parable, Before the Law, which Welles narrates. This is an impressive piece (and I always loved the distinctive Piranesi-style walls) but for a real taste of their breathtaking skill you need to see Night on Bald Mountain, whose Goya-like transformations precede Disney’s Fantasia version by nearly a decade, or their adaptation of Gogol’s The Nose. It’s a shame that YouTube’s compression degrades much of the detail in these films, they really deserve to be seen on a bigger screen, but—as with many of these obscurities—it’s good to know they’re available at all.

Alexeieff and Parker on YouTube:
• Night on Bald Mountain (1933)
• En Passant (1944)
• Before the Law (1962)
• The Nose pt. 1 | The Nose pt. 2 (1963)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka