A study of the myth of the American motor-cyclist: the costume and accessories, the tribal rites, the element of self-destruction.

Kenneth Anger, formerly a child movie actor and maker of home movies in Hollywood, is now a widely acclaimed and pre-eminent figure in the American avant-garde and the author of 'Hollywood Babylon', 'a slander catalogue amounting to a phenomenology of the myth of the scandal in Hollywood'. As one of cinema's true subversive iconoclasts, he has achieved in his romantic yet caustic films, a unique fusion of magic, symbolism, myth, mystery and vision. His influences are the unlikely combination of Hollywood's fantasy, Eisenstein's montage, Cocteau's poetics and satanist Aleister Crowley's magic. His films are an act of magic, not so much anti-christian as pre-christian in their presentation of dark preoccupations, violent subterranean fantasies, without guilt or shame. Like bad and broken dreams, they will affect any audience long before they consciously understand them. Anger sees his films as a body of work in progress; he is constantly revising them, subtly altering their relationships.

Kenneth Anger

Born 1932.

Exhibited films: Escape Episode (sound version( 1946), Fireworks (1947), Puce Moment (1949), Le Jeune Homme et la mort, Eaux d'artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (first version) (1954), Thelma Abbey (1955), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (second version) (1958), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kingstom Kar Kommandos (1965), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (third version) (1966), Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), (1971).