Invocation Of My Demon Brother

WARNING: Watching the Kenneth Anger film I’ve included in this post might make you pregnant. Of course, it might only make you feel like you’ve just been fucked.

It’s hard for me to take Kenneth Anger seriously, or to view him as anything other than as a pretentious poser living off the sales of a successful book, Hollywood Babylon, in order to indulge the pastime of creating experimental, underground films of short duration. Most of the ones I have seen so far are forgettable, or as one commenter on YouTube noted about one in particular, “execrable”.

My brief take on the ones I’ve seen so far-

Rabbit Moon is possibly the most bizarre rendition of the old Italian art form of commedia del arte you could possibly conceive, and is made all the more incomprehensible by the inclusion of a soundtrack that sounds like something thrown together by a group of studio musicians and engineers for a kid-friendly Halloween “House of Horrors”. It’s not just bad, it’s silly-but so is the film.

Scorpio Rising purports to reveal the homoerotic undercurrent hidden beneath the tough-guy neo-Nazi facade of the early nineteen sixties biker sub-culture, but we get the idea that Anger is having us all on-including the subjects of this “documentary” snip-and-splice job that ends with the sound of police sirens somewhere in the distance. One might wonder if the sirens are an artistic yet obviously artificial device that Anger thought would constitute an appropriate ending. I wonder whether he simply called the police.

Even Lucifer Rising is a great disappointment, including (though perhaps understandably so) the soundtrack by Bobby Beausolleil. Although this, like Scorpio Rising, is of historical interest, it is unfortunately unwatchable, despite the presence of Marianne Faithful.

This brings us to the best of a pretty bad lot-Invocation Of My Demon Brother. Ignore the irritating Moog Synthesizer "soundtrack" by Mick Jagger and you can begin to fathom the reason for Anger’s reputation, beginning with his alleged influence on the likes of David Lynch on down through his visionary techniques of film making that has made him an underground cult favorite since-well, since the publicity connecting him with the Manson family.

I present here Part One of a two part You Tube upload, courtesy of Adrian Seelbruder.



Once you’ve seen part one you’ve pretty much got the gist of it, but if you have a hunger for more-



It helps to understand one thing about Kenneth Anger. He’s more than just your garden variety pretentious elitist underground avant garde poser. He’s very possibly an outright liar. For example, he claims he played the part of The Changeling Prince in the film A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet, not so fast-it turns out the part was actually played by a little girl named Sheila Brown. This is not only verified through the extant credits to the film, but is affirmed by Mickey Rooney himself, who played the part of Puck in the movie.

Anger explains this discrepancy by explaining that his mother, who allegedly worked as a seamstress on the set, got him the part by dressing him up like a little girl with a little girl’s pseudonym.

Okay, there are a couple of things wrong with this explanation.

1. Why would it be necessary for a little girl to play the role of a little boy to begin with, especially to the extent that a little boy would have to lie about his gender in order to secure the role-of a little boy, mind you?

2. If this was the case, why didn’t Anger just say this from the beginning, as opposed to waiting until someone questioned his dubious claim?

The only legitimate conclusion to arrive at is that Kenneth Anger-real name Kenneth Anglemyer (and even this is by no means proven, it seems) is a frustrated would-be child star who never quite made it through the front doors of the Hollywood mansion. Perhaps his bitterness at this is reflected in his nom de plume, simplistic as that sounds. Yet, what is known of him serves only to add to the speculation as to his true intent. He claims to have been in dance class with Shirley Temple, and seems to have a solid Hollywood connection, yet his first claim to real fame was Hollywood Babylon, first published in France in the late fifties, yet never released in the states until the mid-nineteen seventies. A sequel followed. I have never read the book, but wonder now whether the information contained therein is trustworthy except for that already known.

Yet, he includes pictures of crime and accident scenes previously never released to the public. One example of this is the accident site and the wreck that claimed the life of Jayne Mansfield, as well as the cadavers of other dead stars. He obviously has connections, but with who and how? I suspect that his cordial relationship with the late Church of Satan founder and High Priest Anton Szandor LaVey might provide a partial answer. LaVey had previously been a crime scene photographer and may have maintained some contacts within that community.

Invocation Of My Demon Brother might well be Anger’s tour de force and his major contribution to film, which might otherwise be as minimal as the length of his average project. Still, at least in this one work, if in no others I have so far seen, he created what might well be a legitimate masterpiece that lends great credibility to the claims regarding his reputation and his influence.

Some interesting facts about this film-

Bobby Beausolleil is in this one, in footage taken from the original now lost Lucifer’s Rising, in which Beausolleil played the title role. Anger grafted the footage of Beausolleil onto this one, which interestingly enough he made in 1969-the year of the Tate-LaBianca murder. Beausolleil had a dispute with Anger shortly after filming the original Lucifer Rising and took off with the film in a huff. Supposedly, Anger and Beausolleil had been roommates-another unproven Anger allegation.

This is all the more bizarre when you consider some of the scenes of the film, some of which hints of some violence as viewed from the distance, from outside of an upstairs window. In another scene, there is a girl smoking what seems to be a bong with some other participants, one of whom is, I think, Beausolleil. The girl looks disturbingly like Patricia Krenwinkle, one of the most vicious of the Manson Family members, though the name given for the actress was Lenore Kandel.

Also in the film is Anger himself, playing a ritual leader, and Anton LaVey, playing the horned ritual leader. There is also old footage of the Rolling Stones, and also what appears to be old newsreel footage of military personnel disembarking from a helicopter, maybe from old Vietnam news archives.

The most eerie of all the scenes however, involve an albino whose name, I am told, is Speed Hacker, and who was a 1960’s era hippy from Haight-Ashbury.

By all means, watch the film and enjoy it, but be warned ahead of time. In regards to Anger’s films, judging by what I have seen thus far, it really does not get any better than this.

As for Anger, he has recently revealed that he is dying of prostate cancer, and, being the Thelemite occultist that he claims to be, has announced that his impending death will transpire this coming Halloween.

I don’t know about anybody else, but do you know what I think? I think he might be lying.