Invocation of My Demon Brother

Colour, 16 mm
USA, 1969, 11 min
Section: Midnight Screenings

Synopsis

Underworld powers gather at a midnight mass to shadow forth Lord Lucifer. Mick Jagger used a moog synthesizer to provide the hallucinatory score. Anger calls this “an attack on the sensorium”.

About the director

Kenneth Anger (b. 1930, Santa Monica, USA) is one of the greatest and most notorious living American avant-garde filmmakers. Drawn to cinema, glamour and scandal early on – his grandmother worked in Hollywood as a dresser and he knew Shirley Temple from school dances – he made his first film of note, Fireworks (1947), at the age of 17. It set the mold for his later oeuvre, silent films of intense sensual imagery combined with mesmerizing musical soundtracks. A follower of necromancer Aleister Crowley, Anger describes his lifework as being “Magick”. His films may be seen as cinematic manifestations of his occult practices, appealing directly to the subconscious mind. Anger also wrote Hollywood Babylon. His filmography includes Puce Moment (1949), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Rabbit’s Moon (1972) and Lucifer Rising (1980).