A special thanks goes out to Cameron Jorgensen, 366 Weird Movies under-appreciated shorts Czar, who discovered most of these films through his own research.

Chicken – Part 2: Resurrection (d. Black Milk Productions): There’s something strange about this short film about diners sharing a chicken dinner, and it’s not just that the quartet is made up of two guys with leprosy, a harlequin, and a Nazi with a mustache, monocle, and cleavage.

Judy’s Smile (d. Rob Parrish): Choice narration alters an educational hygiene film to turn it into a man’s lament over his lifelong abhorrence for his sister’s smile.

Laugh Years Light Trax (d. Freakcast): Audio and video of laughter is dubbed, tweaked, and distorted until it becomes the substance of nightmares.

Mound (d. Allison Schulnik): A community of creepy clay people smile, conjoin, hold hands, and dance to “It’s Raining Today” by Noel Scott Engel in this eerie featurette.

The Piano (d. Matthew Brown): A beautiful, high-intensity piano duet comes to life, and the performers of the piece become the victims of its story.

Salma (d. Martin Sand Vallespir): An animator uses weirdness to protest the issue of unexploded ordinance.

S-Bahn (d. Markus Neidel): Strange creatures ride the subway in this mix of animation and live action.

Snowballs (d. Harmony Korine): Features two characters in Native American inspired clothing, and, not surprisingly for Korine, white trash.  CONTENT WARNING: This short contains some profanity.

Strife on Mars (d. Gibby Goo Bop): An overly-enthusiastic, sandal-wearing, peace-loving, tree-hugging entity presents his first ever music video.

This Moment Is Not (d. Larry Carlson): A monotone soundtrack and the heavily reverberated insights of a mystic.

Content Warning: This short contains brief drug use and violence.

DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti

FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen

PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a

mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List.  Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.

COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts.  The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection  from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find.  Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art.  But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.

For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality.  We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.

The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the beach and carries on an inner monologue the whole time, is a tedious exercise that will remind you of the worst film school indulgences.  It’s included here because of the stature of the director, but it shows off little of the talent he would later bring to Alien and Blade Runner.  Pierre le Pou (1990) is an inconsequential comedy about an uncoordinated man trying to impress a talented and attractive female with his basketball prowess.  Seemingly aimed at flattering film festival fans for their superior taste—though there’s sly satire in the portrayal of the pompous manager of an art theater—The Opening Day of Close-up shows the arthouse fallout when Close-up get steamrolled by The Lion King on its opening day.  Extremely thick Scottish accents make Lynn Ramsay’s Gasman, a drama about a man who takes his children to spend one day a year with their half-siblings, very difficult to follow for American viewers.  Before Dawn is the story of illegal immigrants trying to enter a country through a cornfield.  It’s done in a single 13-minute tracking shot and is a technically amazing feat of choreography and camerawork, but there is little for the audience to connect with storywise.  The mildly amusing Election Night is a satire involving a principled liberal desperate to get to the polls before they close who finds himself in a taxicab driven by an obnoxious racist.  Funnier is Je T’Aime John Wayne, a jazzy black and white portrait of an English man who patterns his life after French New Wave films; anyone should find it hilarious, but a knowledge of cinema trivia will pay extra dividends for film fans (e.g., the love interest is a pixie girl named Zazie).  The most memorable of the “straight” films is Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning Wasp, a sadly believable and strangely sympathetic portrait of a very unfit single mom struggling to feed her four children while longing to find a sex life for herself.

On to the weirder offerings:

The Irish black comedy Six Shooter is another Oscar winner, and one of the best films in the collection.  It isn’t strictly a weird movie, but it deserves an honorable mention thanks to a funny fantasy sequence wherein a “short fella” repeatedly stabs a cow with a screwdriver to relieve it’s “trapped wind.”  The scenario, by playwright Martin McDonagh, here directing his first movie, involves Brendan Gleeson losing his wife, then sharing a train ride home with the most obnoxious traveler imaginable.  Corpses pile up as Glesson’s character experiences the worst day of his, or anybody’s, life.  Rúaidhrí Conroy is extraordinarily loathsome as the foul- and motor-mouthed sociopath.

Nocturne was Lars von Trier‘s final film school short before moving on to features.  Sadly, it has a stereotypically pretentious “film school” look and feel, but it’s clearly an experimental work.  The “story” concerns a woman who’s afraid of sunlight.  All of the shots are low-light and murky; it’s often a struggle to make out what we’re seeing.  There are some memorable shots, like the double image of a woman watching as a solarized man breaks through a plate-glass window in the background.  In the commentary, the director is more than a little amused by the odd visual theories of geometrical correspondences espoused by his earlier self.

Doodlebug is a one-effect, one-joke effort from Christopher Nolan.  It’s amusing and lightly Kafkaesque, but at a mere three minutes it doesn’t hint at what the director is capable of.

Cinematographer Juan Solanas’ directing debut, The Man Without a Head, won a short film Jury Prize at Cannes, and is a favorite for many.  It’s about a man without a head (naturally), who lands a hot date and decides he needs to buy a noggin for the occasion.  Comic complications result. The scenario is similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s short “La Cravatte” (1957).  Unlike some others, I didn’t find this affectionate fable about self-acceptance moving, but the art direction and music are unquestionably excellent.  The headless man in a tuxedo dancing like Fred Astaire in his dingy apartment is unforgettable.  The imaginary French city (based on Marseilles) has a grimy but elegant Europe-between-the-wars look, and it’s entirely draped in drab olives, greens and yellows that clearly evoke The City of Lost Children (1995).

Copy Shop is about a man who works at a copy shop and one day discovers that things he photocopies show up in the real world; he decides to photocopy himself over and over, resulting in an anarchic world of doppelgängers on top of doppelgängers.  The movie’s unique look results from the fact that what we see on the screen is really a painstakingly fluid animation composed from 18,000 actual paper photocopies, with copy errors and low-toner moments included (and sometimes deliberately induced).  The minimalist score by Alexander Zlamal is reminiscent of Philip Glass; the string lines chase each other like a rondo, aurally mimicking the visual copies.  It’s an impressive experiment that results in a wonderfully distressed film.

Roy Andersson‘s World of Glory (1991) prefigures the precise, absurd cinematic hypnotism the auteur would perfect in Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007).  In a scene that’s never placed in context, the movie begins with a crowd silently watching nude people being loaded into the back of a truck, gassed, and driven away.  A middle-aged man keeps glancing back at the camera with a mildly disturbed expression.  (Throughout the film minor characters continue to acknowledge the camera with the same strange look).  We then follow the man through a series of static, repressed tableaux showing his daily life, including his son getting a corporate logo tattooed on his head, his refusal to release the wine cup while taking communion, and finally his insomnia caused by the fact that he hears someone screaming in the distance.  Andersson’s dim view of humanity as a species of moral cowards obsessed with meaningless banality gets under your skin.  It’s cruel and ridiculous, but it’s also frighteningly accurate.  Fans of the director’s grim feature films will feel at home here.

Jabberwocky (1971) is another movie that foreshadows a director’s later work: in this case, Jan Svankmajer signals his intent to mix Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud together into a horrifying yet whimsical witches’ brew, an alchemy that would come to full ferment in Alice (1988).  The Czech stop-motion surrealist indulges his love of vintage objects here, particularly dolls.  Weirdophiles will chuckle with delight as Svankmajer takes us on a tour of his unfiltered subconscious.  A narrator reads the poem “Jabberwocky” while a wardrobe wends its way through a forest, then winds up in an apartment full of toys.  The poem soon ends but we continue to watch as Svankmajer manipulates the objects in the room: a suit of clothes dances and rides a rocking horse, dolls indulge in cannibalism, and branches spontaneously grow and drop apples which immediately rot and split open to reveal worms.  An important short film in the history of stop-motion animation, and Eastern European surrealism.

The gem of the entire collection is Run Wrake‘s fabulous (in both senses of the word) Rabbit (2005).  The story of greedy children who slaughter animals for personal gain but are frustrated by a magical idol, it’s told using images from an old English reading primer.  The names of common objects hover in the air.  Rabbit is such an amazing weird film that we gave it its own post years ago (you can watch the embedded movie at that link, as well).

A review by the Sunday Times described one Cinema 16 collection as “film studies in a box.”  That’s only a slight exaggeration.  Any aspiring filmmaker who watched all of these sixteen movies and paid close attention to the included commentaries would be inspired, and fairly well prepared, to go out and make his own short film.

One final note: Cinema 16 has put out two DVDs titled European Short Films, one available in Region 1 (U.S. and Canada) and one in Region 2 (UK and Europe).  The lineups on the two sets are different.  We reviewed the U.S. version.  Copy Shop, Opening Day of Close-Up, World of Glory, The Man Without a Head, Election Night, Nocturne and Jabberwocky overlap both sets, but the Region 2 version has nine different films, including entries by Jean-Luc Goddard, Tom Twyker, and Chris Morris.  If you’re looking for a particular title check carefully to make sure it’s included in the set you’re ordering.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… these directors seem to prefer surrealism and unusual imagery… for the most serious of viewers, but it meets its goal of introducing viewers to the range of European short film.”–James A. Stewart, DVD Verdict (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Kenneth Anger

FEATURING: Myriam Gibril, Donald Cammell, Marianne Faithfull, Leslie Huggins, Kenneth Anger

PLOT: Lava erupts and the goddess Isis awakens, calling to her husband Osiris.  In a room far away a man wakes up, sits on a throne in his apartment and somehow spears a woman in a forest far away, then climbs into a bathtub to wash off the blood.  Later, the moon awakens the goddess Lilith, a magick ritual summons Lucifer, and flying saucers appear over Luxor, Egypt.

BACKGROUND:

• Anger originally shot a film called Lucifer Rising (A Love Vision) in 1966, which starred Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer.  Anger claimed that Beausoleil stole most of the completed footage and hid it; the star contended that Anger merely ran out of money to complete the movie.  Anger then took out an obituary-style ad in The Village Voice announcing his retirement from filmmaking.  Whatever the case, Anger incorporated some of the surviving footage from the original Lucifer into Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969).
• Anger began working on the project again in 1970 and completed the first cut of Lucifer Rising in 1973, with a score by Jimmy Page.  After a falling out with Page he had the movie re-scored by Bobby Beausoleil.
• Beausoleil was a Haight-Ashbury musician who came under Anger’s influence during the Summer of Love.  After his falling out with Anger the musician joined Charles Manson’s “Family.” He murdered music teacher Gary Hinman in 1969 over a drug deal gone wrong, and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Anger contacted him to create the music for Lucifer Rising, and he wrote and recorded the score from prison.  The band heard on the soundtrack is comprised of his fellow inmates.
• Lucifer Rising was completed with funds from the National Film Finance Corporation of Great Britain, prompting some controversy about state funding of a “devil film.”  Anger also received financial assistance from the Germany’s Hamburg Television and the U.S.’ National Endowment for the Arts.
• Anger did not complete the editing on the final cut until 1981, a decade after work was begun.
• In one of the film’s final scenes there is a long shot of the Colossi of Memnon in Upper Egypt.  If you look hard you can see a puff of smoke rising in the distant background.  According to Anger, this came from him ceremonially burning the film’s script because the work was now complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The orange UFO flying over the crumbling columns of the Temple of Luxor, then peeking over the shoulder of the colossal ancient statue of Ramses II.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Egyptian gods and goddesses frolicking through a magickal

Clips from Lucifer Rising (unrestored version)

psychedelic landscape, summoning Lucifer and flying saucers.

COMMENTS:  A shaggy-haired man in a robe of many colors caresses a stone column.  A woman in a gray robe approaches him from behind, touches him on the arm, then backs away.  The man is Chris (brother of Mick) Jagger, and this is the only time his character appears in Lucifer Rising.   On the DVD commentary Kenneth Anger explains, “he was supposed to play the high priest in my film, but he proved to be too difficult… I had to send him home because he kept asking ‘What does it mean?’  Everything had to mean something to him in his logical mind, and I told him it doesn’t matter what it means, that it matters to me, not to you… If I really wanted to continue with him, I could have made up some story… but the whole thing, the meaning is too complex and deep.  Or simple, if you’re an initiate; it’s almost like a childish fairytale…”

Here are a few of the moments in Lucifer Rising that may have stymied the logical-minded Jagger.  The opening shot of an Icelandic volcano erupting at dawn.  A bare-breasted Egyptian goddess reclining on a giant statue, watching a baby crocodile emerge from an egg with glee.  A man in a robe of pyramids and eyes who wakes up one morning, sits on an Egyptian throne in his apartment, suddenly becomes naked and spears a woman walking in a distant forest, then climbs into a bubble bath to wash off the blood that has drenched him.  Marianne Faithfull in pallid gray makeup, awakened from her coffin by the moon.  Hooded men with torches walking up stone stairs in the moonlight.  An elephant stepping on a cobra.  Anger himself dressed in a red wizard’s cap running around a magical circle in super fast motion.  A man appearing in a satin bowling jacket with the word “Lucifer” spelled out on the back in rainbow colors (a joke and a nod to the opening credits of Anger’s Scorpio Rising) who sits on a throne and shuffles Tarot cards while staring ahead blankly.  A shot of a woodcut of a satyr copulating with a goat.  Lucifer receiving a birthday cake that dissolves into an explosion.  A shot of cattle in a field caught in a thunderstorm.  Donald Cammel as Osiris with his face painted green.  A giant, green, living Martian idol, in front of which naked pink people dance.  And, of course, Egyptian gods waving their ankhs to summon orange flying saucers.

Jagger shouldn’t have worried; in the final cut, Anger’s cinematics sell the craziness and make logical objection pointless.  The photography is magically entrancing, from the primordial erupting lava and bubbling mud to the sandy idols of ancient Egypt, shot against blue skies from low angles to honor their magnificence.  Images of pyramids and eyes recur hypnotically throughout the long montage.  The costuming, sets and makeup are colorful, curious and occult; there are no characters, every actor is transformed into an archetype shuffling mysterious symbols around a mythic chessboard.  The opening scenes are meditative but grow more fractured and experimental as the film progresses, until the flying saucer climax when the film blinks in epileptic negative images like apocalyptic lightning flashes.  Add to this the murderer’s score from Bobby Beausoleil, with its growling blues licks and swelling synthesizers, trance organs and trumpet interludes, which both complements and drives the action.  It’s a masterful accompaniment that expresses all the repressed loneliness of an angry, caged soul briefly granted leave to roam the fields of imagination, desperate to make its moment of reprieve and redemption count.

Like the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lucifer Rising is filled with esoteric symbolism that may have little significance to anyone besides Anger.  To understand the “meaning” of the film in every particular as the director understands it may not be fruitful; it may actually damage the universality of the imagery.  To get a basic grasp of the specific mythology Anger is working with, realize that he is a devotee of the occultist Aleister Crowley (whose portrait briefly appears on a wall).  Crowley taught that humanity passed through three ages (or “aeons”), symbolically ruled by the Egyptian gods Isis, Osiris, and Horus.  He believed that the twentieth century was the end of the age of Osiris (also identified with Christ), and that the age of Horus was about to come.  (Crowley claimed to have all this revealed to him by the “angel” Aiwass, who dictated it to him in a tome called The Book of the Law).  Anger sees this third age as dawning in his lifetime, signaled by the social tumult of the 1960s, and celebrates the destruction of the old repressive Judeo-Christian order and the coming of a new, creative age with Lucifer Rising.  Anger sees Horus as the same archetypal figure as Lucifer—whom he identifies not with the Christian devil, but etymologically as the “bringer of light” associated with Venus, the morning star.  Therefore, in the film we first see Isis, who summons Osiris, and together they summon Lucifer.  Confusing matters, Anger also throws the Jewish figure of Lilith (who he explains was the rejected consort of Lucifer/Horus) into the parade of deities.  Oh, and flying saucers, too.

Few readers are likely to give much credit to Anger’s belief that an angel appeared to Aleister Crowley and correctly predicted a changing of the god guard.  It’s not certain that Anger literally believes this to be true.  At any rate, we do not have to literally believe that God sent his only Son to Earth to suffer for mankind’s sins in order to be moved by a Christ allegory; such stories ultimately deal with deeper universal themes of love and sacrifice.  Similarly, whether we actually believe in Lucifer Rising‘s mythology, we still respond instinctively to the theme of creative transformation it evokes through its depiction of the shifting of the cosmos’ tectonic plates.  And even Anger does not limit himself to a strict doctrinal interpretation of his work, but allows mystery to play around the edges.  Explaining that he put the UFO in Lucifer Rising because the crew actually sighted such an apparition during production but failed to capture it on film, he confesses, “I’m glad I don’t know what it means, because it’s a mystery… That’s what makes life fascinating to me.  I certainly don’t want the answers to everything.”  Wise words, from a perverse Magus.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Anger] makes himself at home in the land of the pharaohs, filming with a magick eye and intimations of Die Nibelungen.”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion (DVD)

“…the vast majority of the film is taken up by such striking imagery that it’s absolutely mesmerizing, even when it’s not quite clear what’s meant to be going on.”–Ed Howard, Only the Cinema (DVD)

“Although Lucifer Rising is only as meaningful as the amount you are willing to read into it, its dreamlike sleepwalk though ancient Gods and tenets does captivate for the admittedly brief duration.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

IMDB LINK: Lucifer Rising (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Look Back with Kenneth Anger – Anger discusses Lucifer Rising (along with his other works) in this rare 1997 interview with Films in Review magazine

Lucifer, Arisen – A journalistic portrait of Bobby Beausoleil by San Francisco Weekly‘s Lessley Anderson, focusing on the soundtrack to Lucifer Rising; it also details the bad craziness of Haight Ashbury in the 1960s, and Anger comes off poorly

956 (98). Lucifer Rising (1972, Kenneth Anger) – Shooting Down Pictures, a blog covering They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?‘s “1000 Greatest Films” list, compiles a large selection of quotes about Lucifer Rising

Kenneth Anger – Video of Anger relating an anecdote about Bobby Beausoleil at a London Q&A in 2006

“Hymn to Lucifer” by Aleister Crowley – The short poem that may have inspired Lucifer Rising

DVD INFO:  Lucifer Rising is officially available on two compilations released by Fantoma.  The first is The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle (buy), a 2-disc collection containing all of Anger’s completed films (and some incomplete ones) up to his temporary retirement in 1981.  The set contains commentaries by Anger, demonstrations of the restoration of each film, outtakes from Rabbit’s Moon, the director’s 2002 documentary on Crowley’s artwork called The Man We Want to Hang, and a booklet with stills and appreciative essays from Guy Maddin, Martin Scorsese and Gus van Sant.

Anger’s 1963-1981 films, including Lucifer Rising, are available separately on the single disc The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2 (buy, reviewed by us separately here).  It’s essentially disc 2 of the Complete set.  Both collections are out-of-print but widely available; when we checked prices, Vol. 2 was going for about the same cost as the The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Funkadelic,” who called it a “film from an era when people were doing drugs to make movies to do drugs to” and said it “reminds me of a longer, darker version the Easy Rider LSD trip scene with crappy music.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Kenneth Anger

FEATURING: Bruce Byron, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, Mick Jagger, André Soubeyran, Claude Revenant, Nadine Valence, Donald Cammell, Marianne Faithfull, Myriam Gibril

PLOT: The disc includes six short, experimental, largely non-narrative films by Kenneth Anger

made between 1964 and 1972.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Compilations are ineligible for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.  Short films have an uphill battle to take a spot on the List that could be occupied by a feature, but either or both of Scorpio Rising and Lucifer Rising (each clocks in at just under 30 minutes long) are meaty and weird enough that they could hear their names called on the final roll.

COMMENTS: Kenneth Anger is one strange dude.  Author of the tabloid-style scandal tome Hollywood Babylon, devotee of Aleister Crowley, pal of rock stars Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, notoriously unreliable self-mythologizer, and winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, Anger spends years working on films that only play for a few minutes (his most extensive work is only 35 minutes long).  He sometimes returns and reworks older movies a decade or more after they are released.  Even if you’ve never seen an Anger film, you’ve seen dozens of movies that have been influenced by his work; due to his innovation of scoring parades of surrealistic images to pop music, he’s sometimes considered the father of the music video (though he hates the form and has turned down offers to make videos).  The refracted images of films like Invocation of My Demon Brother also helped define the film style we now think of as “psychedelic.”  This collection contains Anger’s most important and influential works, from the 1960s and early 1970s—the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, when the formerly struggling underground academic filmmaker found himself embraced by the upcoming generation of hipsters. In order of presentation, the films covered in this collection are:

Scorpio Rising (1964): A young motorcyclist named Scorpio polishes his bike, gets dressed in leather, goes to a wild biker Halloween party, then participates in a race.  Scenes of James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and a “life of Jesus” movie are intercut into the documentary-like footage, along with images of swastikas, comic books, and altered pop art canvases (the image of a death’s head smoking a cigarette labeled “youth” with Christ now appearing in its mirrored shades).  Motown music hits of 1963 play on the soundtrack, often with clever ironic juxtapositions (when “He’s a Rebel” begins, we are shown a quick shot of both Scorpio and Christ).  It includes scenes of a bikers holding down one of their own (an initiate?) and rubbing mustard on his crotch, the apparent desecration of a church as Scorpio urinates on an altar, and skulls popping up everywhere the eye can see.  It’s a eroticized, mythologized vision of the biker lifestyle, with astrological suggestion that Scorpio and his kind are fated to replace the old Christian guard.  Scorpio Rising is frequently cited as one of the most influential avant-garde films ever made, particularly for its innovative use of contemporary pop music and for its taboo-breaking homoeroticism.  Seen through today’s jaded eyes, it’s as much a curious relic of its time as anything; in many ways, it’s actually tamer and duller than Anger’s more abstract movies.

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965): A fragment of an uncompleted project that looks like a retread of Scorpio Rising.  Shot in a pink color scheme to a girl group rendition of Bobby Darrin’s “Dream Lover,” it features a young man in tight jeans polishing his custom-built, gleaming-chrome vehicle with a giant powder puff.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969): Anger has claimed that his films are actually “magickal spells” that are capable of raising demons.  The ratio of literalism to metaphor in this belief is uncertain, but the trancelike, ritualistic Invocation could make you sense that there is a demon standing over your shoulder.  More likely, it will make you think someone secretly slipped magic mushroom elixir into your gin and tonic.  It’s a series of rapid fire psychedelic/occult images, often superimposed one on top of the other, set to an abrasive, repetitive Moog synthesizer figure (“composed” by Mick Jagger) that sounds like a malfunctioning paper shredder.  This is what most people imagine when they think of the term “avant-garde film”; it’s the archetypal hippie drug movie.   Among the jumbled flood of images are an albino blinking in the glare of kleig lights, male full frontal nudity, sped-up clips of Anger performing a magick ritual in Haight Ashbury, kaleidoscopic mirrored shots of a male torso sprouting multiple limbs like a faceless Hindu god, occult and Tarot images imprinted over the film, glimpses of the Rolling Stones, and Anton LaVey in front of a skull altar dressed as a silly-looking cartoon devil (horns and all).  There is, reportedly, a continuous loop of subliminal Vietnam war footage that plays throughout the film but doesn’t register to the naked eye.  Weird fans who can tolerate the soundtrack (there is an option to play a more melodic alternate score by Bobby Beausoleil) will find this short trip on a ten-minute mind-melting machine worth taking.

Rabbit’s Moon (filmed 1950/completed 1972.  The version shown here is the seven-minute, re-cut 1979 edition): Rabbit’s Moon, a re-working of an older film, is a refreshing change of pace showcasing a different, radically calmer Anger, and rates as one of the most interesting pieces in this collection.  Shot in glowing, moonlight-tinted black and white, it’s a commedia dell’arte pantomime wherein the clown Pierrot longs for the moon (where, unaccountably, a rabbit lives).  He is tormented by the sudden appearance of the bushy-eyebrowed Harlequin, who uses a magic lantern to conjures up the female Columbina to entrance him, then steals her for himself.  The classical, poetical influence of Jean Cocteau (an early Anger fan who invited the filmmaker to visit France in the late 1940s) is overwhelmingly evident here, and the movie proves that Anger’s depth of mythological reference goes much deeper than just Aleister Crowley.  The moonlit forest glade set is beautifully artificial, littered with silvery leaves.  The musical accompaniment is a catchy British Invasion styled piece called “It Came in the Night” by the otherwise unknown band A Raincoat.

Lucifer Rising (begun 1970/completed 1980): Mixing the astrological/mythological resonances of Scorpio Rising with the restless psychedelia of Demon Brother, Anger’s last major film is a synthesis of much of his previous work and a fitting cap to his career (he stopped making films for 20 years after Lucifer).  Molded this time around Egyptian mythology and Crowley’s notion of an approaching “Aeon of Horus,” it features appearances by Isis, Osiris (played by Donald Cammell), Lillith (heroin-addicted singer Marianne Faithfull) and the titular Lucifer (a “light-bringing” figure who bears little relationship to the Christian devil in Anger’s personal theology).  The ancient Egyptian gods summon the other deities amidst images of erupting volcanoes and magickal rituals.  A glowing orange flying saucer appears in Luxor over Ramses II’s shoulder.  The growling, apocalyptic rock guitar score was composed by Charles Manson associate and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil from prison! 

The Man We Want to Hang (2002):  Virtually a throwaway piece included as a DVD bonus, this 13-minute short is nothing but a series of shots of canvases painted by Aleister Crowley, scored to classical music.  The paintings themselves are competent, but only mildly interesting to those of us not in the cult.

Played end-to-end, the films occupy about 90 minutes of running time.  Fantoma’s DVD presentation of these pieces is exceptional.  Each entry contains a separate demonstration of each film’s restoration alongside commentary by Anger.  Anger’s discussions are curious, because the notoriously temperamental auteur—known for burning his own films in public, snapping at interviewers, and threatening to put a curse on Jimmy Page after a private spat—comes across as a mellow, erudite, retired professor type when discussing his movies.  Some of his commentary may be unreliable; for example, I found it difficult to swallow his insistence that all of the leather-bound motorcyclists in Scorpio Rising—the guys who dressed in drag, bared their buttocks, and rubbed condiments on each others’ crotches—were straight men who insisted their ever-present girlfriends not appear on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mystic and frequently inscrutable.”–Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)