Kenneth Anger attends MOCA’s 35th anniversary celebration in Los Angeles in March 2014.
Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
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Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
Kenneth Anger attends MOCA’s 35th anniversary celebration in Los Angeles in March 2014.
Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for MOCA
Filmmaker and writer Kenneth Anger was a well-known Hollywood figure, the visionary heir to an international avant-garde scene. But he also reveled in the vulgar and cryptic and essentially disappeared from the public eye for nearly a decade before his death.
Angry death was reported on Wednesday by Spruth Magers Gallerywhich has represented Anger’s work since 2009. Spencer Glasby, who was Anger’s artist contact, told NPR that the filmmaker died of natural causes on May 11 in Yucca Valley, California.
Anger, a child of sunny Southern California, gained notoriety as an irrepressible chronicler of his own shadows. He made pioneering underground films for decades, and claims he got his start in the industry as a child star in a 1935 production of the film. a Midsummer Night’s Dream which starred James Cagney and Mickey Rooney.
In 1947, when he was still a teenager, Anger directed a short gay art film that got him arrested for obscenity. Fireworks, which features no dialogue, men flexing into each other at a bar, unzipping their trousers, lighting cigarettes with flaming bouquets of flowers, and a little surreal sadomasochism. Fireworks and Anger’s other experimental films are now revered as counterculture classics.
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Director of scorpio rise Was also notoriously fascinated by witchcraft. Kenneth Anger was a friend of the Rolling Stones, an enemy of Andy Warhol and the author of a bestselling book, hollywood babylon, that spawned a sequel, a short lived tv series and a season of the popular podcast you must remember that, Several stories that have since been debunked claimed to reveal scandalous secrets of deceased film stars from the silent and golden ages.
