Tag Archives: kenneth anger

Babalon Working

This video is a trailer for Brian Butler’s “Babalon Working” posted by MOCAtv. There was a screening on Sept 19th, which means this is a belated mention, but you can be on the lookout for the next showing.

“MOCAtv Presents a Screening and Performance Event by Los Angeles Artist BRIAN BUTLER at MOCA Grand Avenue, September 19th, 2013.

World Premiere of Brian Butler’s Preternatural Odyssey film BABALON WORKING featuring Paz de la Huerta and the performance TRANSMIGRATION.

To occult artist Brian Butler, aesthetics are ‘magick.’ Elevating mystic practices to the status of art—or elevating art to the status of ritual—Butler’s films and performances are themselves Orphic ceremonies and Satanic rites. Pentagrams, triangles, liturgical hoods in red, white, and black, these iconographic shapes and costumes have a sacred as well as aesthetic function. The arresting imagery and trance-inducing editing of his latest short film The Babalon Working: a Shortcut to Initiation are no exception. Butler’s mentor and collaborator Kenneth Anger once compared making a movie to casting a spell. Perhaps this film will make that assertion literal: The Babalon Working was a ritual devised and practiced by occult master Jack Parsons to manifest Babalon, the divine feminine. Watch and wait.”

Kenneth Anger: how I made Lucifer Rising

“Kenneth Anger: how I made Lucifer Rising” is an article in the Guardian UK, part of a “How We Made” series of articles, with Kenneth Anger talking with Chris Michael about the making of Lucifer Rising. Aleister Crowley and Ordo Templi Orientis both get mentioned, along with the actors Marianne Faithfull and Bobby Beausoleil and other bits of history which may be of interest.

Kenneth Anger: how I made Lucifer Rising
“Technicolor hellcoat … Leslie Huggins as Lucifer in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. Photograph: Sprüth Magers Berlin London”

Kenneth Anger’s Occultism

Kenneth Anger’s Occultism with Judith Noble is an event at Treadwell’s in London, that may be of interest, on Jul 24, 2013 at 7 pm.

“Kenneth Anger is a legend of avant-garde film and a key figure in the counterculture and the late 1960s occult revival. Tonight, a leading expert on esotericism and film considers the way in which Anger created and deployed a unique cinematic occult system in his films, which function as magical rituals for their audiences as well as for their maker. Anger’s magical system, iconography and filmmaking methods are unpacked with clarity of depth and understanding. Judith Noble has a lifelong career in film and media, and decades of study of western esoteric ideas. She now lectures at the Arts University, Bournemouth.”

Kenneth Anger Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 1954 with Anais Nin

 

Kenneth Anger Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 1954 with Anais Nin [HT DisInformation]

“Nin was a pioneer as one of the first women to ply the dirty book trade and she eventually let the works be collected and published widely under the titles Delta of Venus and Little Birds. She’s considered to be among the best writers of the female sexual experience.

Along with Miller, Nin became a counterculture hero during the unrest of the 1960’s. While Miller championed freedom of libido in his writing and fought for free of speech in his battles against censorship, Nin was perceived as the kind of strong, talented, liberated woman that the just-budding feminist movement was still trying to articulate.” [via]

Brian Butler conjures the demon Bartzabel

“Brian Butler conjures the demon Bartzabel” is an article that further discusses from the viewpoint of someone in attendance interviewing Brian Bulter about his recent public Bartzabel working at L & M Arts in Los Angeles.


Bartzabel Working by Brian Butler from Brian Butler on Vimeo.

 

“The auteur of this scene is Los Angeles-based artist Brian Butler, an icon in an occult subculture that has blossomed over the last decade. A would be polymath—artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer—Butler’s persona has been constructed around an overt dedication to the black arts, and a willingness to make public the rituals and tenets of a faith that have traditionally been kept secret by others. That, along with his ties to people with infamous reputations, most notably Kenneth Anger, have made him equally lauded and reviled.

The scene in question—Butler’s latest and most grandiose display—was a public performance of Aleister Crowley’s The Bartzabel Working. Based on techniques of evocation found in medieval grimoires, the ritual was written in 1910 and designed to manifest Bartzabel, a traditional spirit of Mars in Western occultism, through a hooded person placed in a magical triangle. The crowd, which packed the gallery’s courtyard, was the largest ever assembled to witness a Crowleyan rite.” [via]

 

“Are there precedents for what you are doing, or do you believe it to be unique? What do you think the connection with ritual portends for the future of art and performance?

In the context of the art world, this connection is a new one—it hasn’t really been explored. Certainly there have always been artists interested in the occult, and who allowed that to inspire their work—it even became a kind of subgenre in early Modernism, but it was often hidden under the formal content of the work, as in the case of Piet Mondrian, for instance. But the overt connection, with the performance of ritual magick as art, is something new. I think it is a step towards a more intimate relationship between artist and audience—I am reminded of something that Marina Abramovic elucidated to me about the occult in the context of performance, that the future will be one of a non-objective world without art in the sense that we have it now. She foresees us attaining a mental state and level of consciousness enabling us to transmit thoughts to other people. “There will not be sculptures, or paintings, or installations,” she once said, “there will just be the artist standing in front of a public, which is developed enough to receive a message or energy.” I think the fusion of art and ritual is a step toward that kind of connectivity and that kind of intimacy.” [via]

For the Martian Chronicles exhibit and The Bartzabel Working performance

For the Martian Chronicles is an exhibit at L & M Arts in their West Gallery space located in Los Angeles. This overall exhibit includes works by a number of artists, such as Kenneth Anger, Brian Butler and Cameron Parsons.

“L&M Arts is proud to present For the Martian Chronicles, an exhibition that pays homage to the late writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), who in the 1940’s lived in a home located on the current L&M Arts property.”

“Curated by Yael Lipschutz in honor of Bradbury and his journey into the red unknown, the exhibition will include the original manuscript of The Martian Chronicles …” [via]

The exhibition itself will feature a nightly film loop that includes films from Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, Brian Butler’s Night of Pan.

 

Tonight, on Tue, Dec 4th from 8:30p–11:30p, there will be a special performance of The Bartzabel Working by Brian Butler, actor James Franco and others.

“Based on a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the famed British occultist Aleister Crowley, the ritual later became part of Los Angeles history in 1946 when Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket scientist and Crowley protégé Jack Parsons conducted his own version of this rite, with the intention of placing a martial curse on a pre-scientology L. Ron Hubbard.

For his reinterpretation of this historical performance, Butler will conjure Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars, evoking the site that was once home to the late sci-fi author Ray Bradbury and currently comprises L&M Arts. The ritual will have Butler as Chief Magus, leading a cast drawn from his upcoming feature film King Death and featuring Henry Hopper as Assistant Magus, Noot Seear as Magus Adjuvant, and James Franco as Material Basis, the vessel though which the spirit of Mars manifests.

The performance will take place on Tuesday, December 4th at 8:30pm, followed by a reception with tunes courtesy of DJ artist Eddie Ruscha and a choreographed performance by artist Nana Ghana and Future Eyes.” [via, also]

Kenneth Anger Box Set

 

“‘The Kenneth Anger Box Set’ is a Fantoma Films release now available through Microcinema DVD. To order this DVD and/or other titles distributed by Microcinema, go to: www.microcinemadvd.com.

Cinematic magician, legendary provocateur, author of the infamous HOLLYWOOD BABYLON books and creator of some of the most striking and beautiful works in the history of film, Kenneth Anger is a singular figure in post-war American culture. A major influence on everything from the films of Martin Scorsese, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and David Lynch to the pop art of Andy Warhol to MTV, Angers work serves as a talisman of universal symbols and personal obsessions, combining myth, artifice and ritual to render cinema with the power of a spell or incantation. This 2-DVD set contains Angers complete Magick Lantern Cycle, from his landmark debut FIREWORKS in 1947 to his breathtaking phantasmagoria LUCIFER RISING in 1981. Fantoma is very proud to present the films of this revolutionary and groundbreaking maverick, painstakingly restored and presented on DVD for the first time in one collection.

Special Features
· High definition transfers from newly restored elements
· Screen specific audio commentary by Kenneth Anger
· Rare outtakes from Rabbits Moon
· Anger’s 2002 film The Man We Want To Hang
· Restoration Demonstrations
· Restored stereo soundtrack for Lucifer Rising, re-mastered from the original session tapes
· Additional audio track for Invocation Of My Demon Brother
· Booklet with written appreciations of Kenneth Anger by Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant, and Guy Maddin, written introduction to Lucifer Rising by Bobby BeauSoleil, notes for each film, rare photos, and more.”