Kenneth Anger was born around 1930 in Santa Monica near Los Angeles. His grandmother was a dresser in Hollywood. When he was four he began dance lessons with Theodore Koslott, a dancer in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and at the age of five he appeared in Max Reinhardt's " Midsummer Night's Dream ".
He made seven films between 1937 and 1945 and in 1947 made Fireworks . He then went to live in France where he met
Jean Cocteau, shot Rabbit's Moon, and worked at the French Cinémathèque on matching a print of Eisenstein's Que viva Mexico with the original script.
Through Jean-Jacques Pauvert he published his book "Hollywood Babylon ", in French, of which a second, American, version was published in 1975, with a third under way. He then moved to the East Coast in the USA, and in the sixties lived in London where he developed a working relationship with Mick Jagger, finally returning to California where he lives today.
For Kenneth Anger the aura of "scandal" and that of the filmmaker, just like that of mystery and magic that surrounded his life, are complementary rather than opposites, since the filmmaker embodies the figure of the rebel in our era, whose mythology, both current and ancient, he explicitly explores. From the dramatising of contemporary sexual myths (1940s-1960s) to those from Egyptian, Indian, Greek and even Hollywood mythology, Kenneth Anger has never ceased to pursue his cinematic preoccupation with light ; another constant in his work is his pronounced sense of irony: "My approach is ironic...it is the way I see things (thus mitigating the shock produced by the swastikas and image of Hitler in Scorpio Rising). In so doing, from his early 20s he laid out the framework within which his work was understood by commentators on his work."
Claudine Eizykman, "Hommage à Kenneth Anger", Un Cabinet d'Amateurs n°14, July 1994, Paris.
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