When Jonas Mekas, Alfred Leslie, etc sat down to compose the mainfesto of "The New American Cinema" in 1961, the amount of films made under this artistic statement doubled. Out of this period, we see the creation of some of the greatest underground films the world has seen. Taylor Meed's The Flower Thief, Bruce Conner's A Movie and Report, and most importantly Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.
Scorpio Rising's devices are fundementally simple-didactic montage, ironic sountracks, and archival footage. What seperates SR from the realm of mediocre is its deep underooted message of sexual perversion, S&M, and the cruelty of sexuality to a point of Nazist ideology. Scenes such as young man with a smile on his face being "raped" by leather clad bikers is a point of sadio-estasy. To say that SR is not a 22 min. perversion is to ignore its fundemental principles and the principles of its filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger has emerged himselfin both the terror of the haunte monde of Hollywood in the 30's (hence the birth of his hugely read Hollywood Babylon- a study as perverse as SR) and the drug and sexually illusioned world of the 50's/60's lower bohemia.
Scorpio Rising is a film of a generation. As Allen Ginsberg put it: "a generation starved on madness". It's signifigance ranks up there with Keroauc, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Anger's film is a portrait of a world so far from our 90's train of thought- yet so strikingly fimiliar.
Scorpio Rising's devices are fundementally simple-didactic montage, ironic sountracks, and archival footage. What seperates SR from the realm of mediocre is its deep underooted message of sexual perversion, S&M, and the cruelty of sexuality to a point of Nazist ideology. Scenes such as young man with a smile on his face being "raped" by leather clad bikers is a point of sadio-estasy. To say that SR is not a 22 min. perversion is to ignore its fundemental principles and the principles of its filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger has emerged himselfin both the terror of the haunte monde of Hollywood in the 30's (hence the birth of his hugely read Hollywood Babylon- a study as perverse as SR) and the drug and sexually illusioned world of the 50's/60's lower bohemia.
Scorpio Rising is a film of a generation. As Allen Ginsberg put it: "a generation starved on madness". It's signifigance ranks up there with Keroauc, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Anger's film is a portrait of a world so far from our 90's train of thought- yet so strikingly fimiliar.