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BUT DON’T YOU PANIC, I’LL GIVE YOU A SATANIC MECHANIC : Shiny vehicles and pretty boys in Kenneth Anger’s cinema

Scorpio Rising (1963)

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)

A month ago, cinema’s greatest magician left the physical realm and as an hommage to Kenneth Anger, I felt obligated to dig into his filmography again. Far from the occult work I’m usually drawn too, it felt like the right time to rediscover his classic film : Scorpio Rising.

My first encounter with this proto-documentary on a group of bikers happened back in 2019, during an experimental cinema course I took at university. While a classroom doesn’t seem like the proper place to fully enjoy, the power conveyed by the beautiful images still managed to take me away. Almost 5 years later, I found myself drawn to this film, moved by an urge to rediscover this experimental piece.

But what is Scorpio Rising about? Like most experimental films, it’s obviously guided by this fantastic quest to look for beauty in the ordinary, to transform simple things into shimmery jewels. Motorcycles shine and become accessories to the bikers. Far from the traditional straight hyper-masculine figures that usually inhabit the world of bikers, Anger follows the group through the prism of homoeroticism - a bedroom full of James Dean’s pictures, leather jackets customised with studs resembling glitters in the distance, men in drag to replace their actual girlfriends. Moving along with the group and the speed of their bikes, Scorpio Rising takes a step back from the polished images and explores an uglier side of those man-machines where torture and church trashing meet the use of Nazi imagery - act of subversion or real political affinity from its actors/characters ? To this day, the film still is an important part of queer cinema and a gay man’s point of view on a 1960’s New York.

To continue this “automobile double feature”, I picked a short film I hadn’t seen yet : Kustom Kar Kommandos. Abolish the KKK’s white supremacy, hail to the car’s supremacy! This 3-minute long film feels like one of David Cronenberg or Julia Ducournau’s fever dreams with its lush cinematography, full of pinks and reds. Here, the car is the true main character being carefully polished by a guy never seen as a whole. A vehicle almost presented as a woman with the pastel pink background and vulva-like car seats which contrast with the man’s blue outfit. To further this man-machine relationship, the car sports a magnificent shiny body in which the human figure can reflect. The intensive polishing of the metal shapes the machine into a mirror only to cast back the man’s own masculinity. More than in love with his car, he’s in love with the reflection of himself and everything related to a man’s image.

Mechanic has always been related to masculinity and Kenneth Anger uses the representation of vehicles in his film to define his own of idea of the man : reckless, narcissistic and deeply gay. A man in love with the image of himself reflecting in the body of his car and in love with other men which he keeps picture of in his bedroom.

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• FOTD - Film Of The Day :

The Color of the Pomegranate by Sergei Parajnov (1969)

I follow a very nice YouTube channel called Kino Domain which posts very diverse movies from Horror to Film Noir or Italian Neorealism. While looking for the film that would make my evening, I came upon one that has been in my watchlist for a very long time : The Color of the Pomegranates.

Created as a surrealist biopic of Sayat Nova, the film tells the story of the Armenian poet’s life through his poems and the images. No need for long dialogues when every shot is carefully composed to reflect the beauty of Nova’s words. You dive into the world of poetry and catch a glimpse of Armenian and Georgian culture in the meantime.

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TerrorVision | 1986

[madredellelacrime]

welcome, welcome to my Tumblr or blog. I’ll talk about about the films I watch and maybe shitpost about my life.