I THE DOMINANT TREND WITHIN the American avant-garde tradition has been the evolution of the subjective cinema. There is strong evidence of a shift in the late 1950s from the…
KENNETH ANGER was an audacious filmmaker, a self-proclaimed magus, a never-closeted queer, a shameless scandalmonger, a sometime Satanist, a difficult person, and, as P. Adams Sitney put it, the “conscious artificer of his own myth.” He was also the King of Pop at least that’s what I thought on first seeing Scorpio Rising (1963) in the mid-1960s, age sixteen, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.There were other movies on that program; I remember being impressed by Gregory Markopoulos’s Ming Green and Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity. But Scorpio Rising blew everything else away: the enameled
Jonathan Rosenbaum pays tribute to the Canadian artist and filmmaker who reinvented cinema on his own terms in works including the 1967 landmark Wavelength.
The working of his thought is thus concerned with that slow transformation of the notion of space which, beginning as a vacuum chamber, as an isotropic volume, gradually became a system inseparable from the matter it contains and from time. Paul Valery, Introduction To The Method Of Leonardo Da VinciMy eye, tuning towards the imaginary, will go to any wavelengths for its sights. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors On VisionTHERE IS A METAPHOR recurrent in contemporary discourse on the nature of consciousness: that of cinema. And there are cinematic works which present themselves as analogues of consciousness