Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

I first encountered this work around 1967, in a period when I was seeing many underground films in New York and Los Angeles, some shown in progress by the makers themselves. It was a heady time, and my memory was of a richly textured, opulent work that was surely Anger's magnum opus up to that time.

Last week, more than 3 decades later, I saw it again and was amazed at how inept and self-indulgent it was. The only thing holding it together is the appropriated sound track, Leos Janacek's masterful Glagolitic Mass, a creation that is far older than the film but has retained its genius. The visuals (like all of Anger's work, this is a silent movie with music) are little more than a pretentious thrift-shop costume show aspiring to pageantry, with little detectable underlying meaning or cinematic form.

The notion of camp was not yet formulated in 1954, when IotPD was made, but the film inadvertently exemplifies the concept -- or was Anger really satirizing a self-conscious social circle along with a certain type of dilettantish cluelessness and muddled cinematic thinking when he made this? What a huge disappointment after mistakenly thinking so well of this movie for so many years!

Swallowing jewelry? Drinking potions? A birdcage as head-dress? Kenneth Anger's IOTPD is the trippiest, most gorgeously haunting and sensual of film experiences I have ever seen; trust me, it will leave your mouth gaping in sheer awe. Hallucinogenic, weirdly stagnant and moving at the same time, a head-first dive into Crowley Land, an otherworldly playground of dreams deluged with sensuality and, as the title suggests, pleasure. You can watch it again and again and still never bore of it. Mesmerizing and beautifully filmed. Easily Anger's masterpiece (more so than SCORPIO RISING or LUCIFER RISING), and better than any other dives into "psychedelic psinema" (THE TRIP and the acid montage from EASY RIDER come to mind). There has never EVER been anything like this trippy tour de force of style in the history of the cinema.

A Slavonic Mass by Leos Janácek plays as historical figures, biblical characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome. Aphrodite, Lilith, Isis, Kali, Astarte, Nero, Pan, and the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman are part of a visual feast of images superimposed, hallucinations, and the spirit of decadence of the "Yellow '90s." Kenneth Anger is a strange dude. No one else, before or since, has really made a name for themselves in blending mythology, the occult and elaborate costumes. How seriously you are to take his occultism is up to you, I suppose.

The version I watched had a rock score over the top. I am not sure it was there originally and I rather doubt it, but it helped the picture out tremendously. A retrospective on Anger really needs to be done, as it is surprising how few modern directors cite his work.

Quite possibly,the most incomprehensible film every made, Kenneth Anger's INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME deserves a place in cultural, if not film history. Arcane satanic references merged with bizarre hallucinogenic Egyptian rituals, and all done with a straight face, are endlessly fascinating to any student of the subculture of Hollywood and San Francisco in the post-war years. This was a time when to be gay or of a mixed gender was considered not just socially unacceptable, it was considered a sign of sickness. I don't think that a film like this could have been made without the cultural stigma associated with being part of the sexual underworld.

As an 'experimental film,' though, it's not really that original. Anger borrows heavily from Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren and others, whose work was far more original and far less self-conscious. It nevertheless, amazingly I should say, holds your interest (since it's only 35 minutes, partially) and I would reccomend it to anyone interested in the fringes of the art world.

Along with the dream-logic violence of his first film 'Fireworks', and the infamous leather 'n' engines homoerotica of 'Scorpio Rising', 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome' is one of Kenneth Anger's most powerful films, and the all-important centrepiece of his 'Magick Lantern Cycle' collection.

This film is a dizzying neon kaleidoscope of the rebellious imagination: drag queen-like, garish chameleons taunt us from behind ceremonial masks and drink a powder that transmogrifies them into drugged-up lusty creatures of bestial ecstasy; subliminal magick symbols appear and vanish, burning our eyes; black-and-white footage of a turn of the century film adaptation of Dante's Inferno glows as a sinister backdrop, its moonlight illuminating heathens being shovelled into pits of flame by demons -- all the while mocked by the laughing monsters of our own film in the foreground; faces emerge and disappear, dart and glide in and out of view, giving the intimate experience of being limbs-tangled-deep inside this orgy of occultism and colour.

This is one of Anger's longest short-films, and features Janáček's 'Glagolitic Mass' as both ironic and fitting soundtrack (other Anger films feature bubblegum rock 'n' roll and doo-wop of its era, adding a perverse sweetness to the subtlety malevolent imagery). With the added length, the film feels more exhausting and epic than some of Anger's shorter films, yet it lasts for under forty-five minutes.

'Inauguration' is queer cinema (before it existed), post-Cocteau Surrealism and Crowley-inspired, esoteric true-will in action, all at once. And, love or hate him for it, no other director is more responsible for MTV and music video culture in proceeding generations -- just without the Thelema, intelligence and intentional homoerotica (lots of unintentional homoerotica was retained).

A celebratory rebellion against the tedious repressions of religion and Christian 'morals', very brave, and really quite astonishing for the post-World War II 'new world' of 1950s cinema: 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome' is essential-viewing for fans of influential avant-garde, experimental cinema.