Magick Lantern Cycle

California filmmaker Kenneth Anger's extant works collectively known as the Magick Lantern Cycle are stunningly beautiful, disturbing, strange, and unforgettable. Although certainly time capsules of their period in many ways, thanks to their subject matter and Anger's visual approach they are simultaneously very much ahead of their time and still manage to shock and awe quite potently.

Featured here are moon-lit harlequins, James Dean-obsessed bikers on Coney Island, pink powder-puffed hot rods, a daydreaming 1920s-inspired starlet, Anaïs Nin with her head in a birdcage at a vibrant and hedonistic party, the Fountains of Tivoli, doo-wop and a Mick Jagger Moog-synthesized soundtrack that sounds like it could have been made in a studio this morning, occult ceremonies, cameos from Anita Pallenberg and Anton LaVey, Marianne Faithfull in Egypt, a flying saucer over the Sphinx, and an appearance and score by Bobby Beausoleil (Anger's lover for a time) recorded while he was actually in prison, sentenced for murder because of his connections with the Manson family!

In 2007, Fantoma released the collection in two volumes which hold the complete Cycle: Fireworks (1947), Rabbit's Moon (1950 & 1972), Puce Moment (1949), Eaux d'Artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), The Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1970-1980).

These pieces blend the Avant-Garde, period documentation, psychedelia, rituals and the supernatural, the creepy and the fantastic, as well as a generous serving of dreamlike sequences all into a giant colorful cauldron of film.