The American underground filmmaker who treated cinema as ceremonial magick · whose Crowley-Thelemite Lucifer Rising is the direct precursor to the occult strand running through Coil, Psychic TV and the whole TG-Thelemite lineage.
Kenneth Anger (1927–2023) is one of the founding figures of American underground cinema, and I keep him in the Adjacent sub-section as the occult-cinema upstream of the scene the archive documents. His lifelong fusion of film and ceremonial magick is the direct art-historical precursor to the occult strand that runs through Coil, Psychic TV and the larger Thelemite lineage of the post-Throbbing Gristle world.
Anger was a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley and a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and he treated filmmaking itself as a magical operation: the film as a spell, the screening as a rite. That is the same Crowleyan current the scene's occult wing drew on, and it is what distinguishes Anger from a merely stylistic influence. When Genesis P-Orridge built the Temple ov Psychick Youth around Psychic TV, or when Coil pursued their magical and Thelemite preoccupations, they were working a seam Anger had opened on film decades earlier.
His magnum opus is Lucifer Rising, a decade in the making and widely released in 1980, an OTO-themed invocation of a new occult age in which Lucifer is the bringer of light rather than the Christian fallen angel. The film's legend is bound up with its soundtrack, composed in prison by Bobby Beausoleil; I record the darker associations of that circle as documented history without dwelling on them, and documents the work for its art-historical influence rather than its notoriety.
Equally important to the scene's visual grammar is Scorpio Rising (1963), Anger's film of biker subculture, death and iconography scored with a sequence of pop records used as ironic counterpoint. That foundational use of found pop music against image anticipates the montage logic of the music video and of much later industrial visual practice, and it sits behind the scene's habit of setting transgressive image against familiar sound.
Anger's method, dense ritualistic montage, saturated colour, layered occult iconography and the film conceived as invocation rather than story, collected across decades as the Magick Lantern Cycle, is the template for a cinema of symbol and rite. It is a different register from Derek Jarman's hand-made Super-8 lyricism, but the two filmmakers are the Adjacent sub-section's twin poles of a cinema bound to the scene: Jarman the contemporary collaborator, Anger the occult ancestor.
I keep Anger on the precursor and documentary tests: he is not of the industrial scene, but the scene's occult imagination cannot be told without him, and the Thelemite filmmaking he pioneered is the direct upstream of its magical wing. He is documented in the Visual department as the figure who made magick into cinema, and whose influence the scene's occult strand carried into sound.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene