Thursday, 18 October 2012

Pop Songs For A Rapture [Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)]

From http://www.journeybyframe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Inauguration-of-the-Pleasure-Dome.png

Dir. Kenneth Anger
USA
Film #17, of Wednesday 17th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

The films ‘made by Anger’ are both maximalist but were made as underground and independent works, an economy of means required for the bloody red images of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome to exist at all. As Leo Janacek’s majestic Glagolithic Mass plays over said colours however, we can be glad Kenneth Anger exists in the first place.

I was originally going to review James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) but I couldn’t connect with it. I am both a coward to not give a bad review to a film probably liked by many, but reviewing films just after watching them that same night was bound to dumbfound my mind at some point. I will say that on the first viewing I was disappointed, reading the original H.G. Welles story in anticipation of a rollicking write-up. Reading the original story, and finishing it the same day you watch the film adaptation does not help, and the amused tone James Whale gave the film felt like a half hearted attempt to improve a weak entry in the Universal horror catalogue. First viewings are fickle, but who puts a romantic interest in the adaptation, none existent in the original story, and writes it like an afterthought? Only a sentient pair of policeman’s trousers skipping along a countryside road feels appropriately ‘magikal’ for this Halloween for me – the rest feels too garbled in my mind right now to process out on a keyboard.

From http://bombsite.powweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/pleasureklein.jpg
Kenneth Anger as a myth is more appropriate for the witching season, his biography so intangible in what the facts are, of his life and the works that may have been lost or not, that it dwarfs Perfect Blue (1997), the film I reviewed in the last post, in terms of the multiple realities and versions of Anger even before you get to his films. Yes I am cheating at this point with the rules of writing 31 reviews for horror films or anything close to the genre, but unlike the hundreds to the dozen films I could have chosen, I am choosing a film from a worthy candidate, who will be remembered after his death and dealt in making his films into magical incantations, far more profoundly absorbing and exhilarating than a camcorder shot Dawn of the Dead (1978) rip-off or something similar.

Inauguration... is the LSD awakening I will probably never experience outside this film, a drug even championed by actor Cary Grant but illegalised in the US of A and obsolete in its concepts of psychic awakening in the Millennia except from musicians who evoke the psychedelia of the period. With its images of naked bodies, swarming in mass, on a cliff in Hell superimposed between the celebration of pure ecstasy however, this is not the LSD evolution Timothy Leary envisioned – his name always evoking the girl who suggested we research him for a group project at university, who was so achingly beautiful to me, and the only person yet I’ve openly flirted with, that I cannot mention one without the other now, beauty and acid trips as inseparate as in this film – his belief in the narcotic expanding the mind rejected by Inauguration... in favour of a complete separation from the confines of the human body and reality.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) evoked how commercialism of the legacy of Halloween was a destructive force, perfectly followed in this season by a short film filtered with magical occultism, desiring to evoke a subconscious effect on the viewer. Some may view that as a crass comparison, but if the neglected sequel of mainstream horror franchise can open the doors to this idea, an older gem of American experimental filmmaking is able to develop it further. It took a few viewings to be fully impressed by Inauguration..., maybe needing another or more beyond this review to fully embrace, but on a large blank screen, a canvas, the 1950s melodrama of colours and a purple and/or lime green skinned Osiris presiding over a Californian mass of unadulterated joy seeps into your eyes and fills them fully. Is not Halloween a celebration of the supernatural, dressing up in elaborate costumes – from a creature with long fingernails to Marilyn Monroe as a Greek Aphrodite – and channelling the mysterious? That the film was inspired by a Halloween party at which guests were invited to ‘Come As Your Madness’ cements the connection. As a suburban English boy near the countryside, this grand spectacle is becoming more enticing as art, maybe rising in me the dulled blood of my mystical fathers on this pagan land and believers of the supernatural, while showing how exceptionally well made it all is.

I cannot read into the influence of Aleister Crowley in this film, but with its flamingo pinks and crimson reds, yellows and greens, golds and shadows, the film creates magical effects just through its elaborate colour palette. Led by the hand into the film by the likes of the Scarlet Woman and Cesare the Somnambulist, portrayed by filmmaker Curtis Harrington, bleeded from the black and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the overblown theatrics even before Anger’s seminal Scorpio Rising (1963) created the closest to what eventually became the music video but fully using the collaboration of images and music to have a deeper gut and mind reaction. Montage, straight from the books of director Sergei Eisenstein, cut-up and arrange the orange-red images in a way to allow Anger to make the personal cinema he desired. Like the gems that are eaten in the party guests, it is a collage of imagery and textures, filmed in the house of Hollywood outsider Samson De Bier, as rich as the home shown on screen with its Japanese rugs to paintings of big eyed black cats against the sliding door that leads to the Pleasure Dome. It is sensual at its maximum, and with Janacek’s score allowed to be heard properly for the first time for me on a decent sound system, my middle class surroundings felt at odds with such a film, the doubling faces of the beings within the film’s world far too intense for the restrained living room with its modest brown red motif. Drawing from occultism, the supernatural and Hollywood – read Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books if you can – it still stands out in whatever setting you view it, but you also realise how forcibly normal your surroundings can be if viewed against the work of a director trying to evoke other spiritual plains. I do not want to image this playing at a modern cinema regardless if it caters to art films – something like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome needs a ‘Dream Palace’ of early American cinema with its vast decoration and rows of theatre seats like at an opera to feel at home in it, not the Bauhaus-esque designs of modern buildings, without the elegant German stylisation, or fast-food coloured multiplexes.

I’m glad this is available for me to watch over and over again regardless. As my appreciation for experimentation grows despite my pickiness with it, my admiration for Kenneth Anger that already existed is probably going to grow immensely. And this sort of film feels so more right for a Halloween season to write about. Films dealing with supernatural entities of mythology make sense for Halloween, continuing the legends even in modern settings. Something like dead teenager films or slashers don’t the more you think about it outside of the Halloween series, more appropriate for any other time outside of All Hallows Eve, except Christmas when homicidal Santa Claus films would be more fitting. An incantation of pure adulterated pleasure within a full spectrum of colours and occult symbolism feels far more of a celebration of the month and fits with the pagan imagery that scares the conservative Christians away.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/inauguration-of-the-pleasure-dome/w448/inauguration-of-the-pleasure-dome.jpg?1289442710

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