Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Full transcript coming soon.

After returning from France, Anger began an extraordinary project documenting the ritualized, leather-bound lives within an all male community of a Brooklyn Hell’s Angels chapter. Using montage and a jukebox structured pop soundtrack with unprecedented élan and brilliance, Anger transformed his footage into a meditation on speed, death and masculinity that uses the biker subculture to reveal darker currents running through postwar American popular culture.

A jewel-like fragment from a never realized feature film meant as a West Coast counterpart to Scorpio focusing on Southern California hot rod culture.

Anger offers a terrifying vision of war and simmering male puissance that intermingles footage from Vietnam newsreels, the Haight-Ashbury scene and a Satanic ritual performed by Anger himself, united by the propulsive drone soundtrack composed by Mick Jagger on an electronic keyboard.

One of the great avant-garde films of the 1970s, Lucifer Rising was one of Anger’s most elaborate productions, filmed largely in Egypt and starring Scottish director Donald Cammell and Marianne Faithful as ancient gods engaged in occult ritual. Starkly beautiful and mesmerizing, Anger’s film features an incredible score composed by Manson Family member Bobby Beausoliel.