Look Back With Anger

Octogenarian occultist Kenneth Anger looks back on a career lived on the film industry's edge, and reveals he still has some tricks up his sleeve

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Kenneth Anger is a living legend. He challenged the censors with his 1947 homo-erotic debut Fireworks. He inspired Martin Scorsese and David Lynch with the biker trip-out Scorpio Rising. His pop-driven visuals laid the ground for MTV. His 'Hollywood Babylon' books - the first of which appeared in 1959 followed by a 1984 sequel - exposed seedy Tinseltown. He announced his own death in the pages of the 'Village Voice'. Rock gods Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page jumped at the chance to work with him. After 60 years of film and myth-making, Anger shows no signs of slowing down or mellowing. "At the moment I'm doing an ambitious film on the Hitler Youth," he says. "It's called Ich Will!. I've been working on it for about 10 years now. I hope to finish it in a year or two."

The 27-minute film Ich Will! is a mosaic of Nazi propaganda footage culled from the collections at London's Imperial War Museum and The Library of Congress in the US. Anger is also still tinkering with 'Elliott's Suicide', a personal film tribute to his friend and neighbour, the musician Elliott Smith who stabbed himself to death in 2003. Anger likes to keep working on his films and never considers them finished. "I'm still alive!" he shouts. "Until I die everything is a work in progress. It annoys the historians because they can't then date them but they're my films and I'll do it my way."

In an industry where 'independent' has become a meaningless term, Anger is out there by himself. He is a true maverick working, talking and thinking outside the system. "I've never considered myself part of anything because I'm a loner," laughs Anger. "I'm a hermit. I work alone. The films are by Kenneth Anger. I don't care what labels are put on it." He rejects the term avant-garde as a cliché for artistic expression. "You could call my films experimental I guess, but I just prefer independent," he says. "I don't work for anyone else and I've never wanted to. I want maximum freedom with minimum restrictions. I never knocked on the door of any studio. They're run like feudal systems. I couldn't work in that world so I created my own."

Next page • "I made my first film in 72 hours while my parents were at a funeral"