Kenneth Anger Retrospective

Kenneth Anger

In association with the Irish Film Institute, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is truly honoured to welcome Kenneth Anger to Dublin for a retrospective program of his films and a Public Talk.

Kenneth Anger’s work constitutes a radical critique of Hollywood, often evoking and referencing pop icons within occult settings and depicting youth counterculture in the midst of violence and eroticism. Anger does not use a narrative-based style, but rather lyrically explores themes of ritualistic transformation and transfiguration. His films are imbued with a baroque splendor, stemming from the heightened sensuality of his opulent colours and imagery, often accompanied by a haunting soundtrack.

Born in 1930 in Santa Monica, California, Kenneth Anger grew up in the heart of the show business world: his fascination with Hollywood’s seamy underside later saw him author a pair of controversial tomes, 1965’s Hollywood Babylon and its 1984 sequel. Anger began experimenting with the celluloid form as a teenager – by the age of seventeen, he had already created the seminal Fireworks, laying the foundations for his ‘Magick Cycle’ of films.

His ground-breaking works form one of the most thrilling bodies of work in cinema; the man’s formidable oeuvre has influenced generations of artists and filmmakers: from Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman to Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, their debt to Anger is incalculable. The mythology surrounding his life and work is the stuff of legend, from his involvement with the occult, astrology and the pop world, to the announcement of his own death in the pages of The Village Voice, and the destruction, loss and banning of his films. Ultimately, however, the raw power of Kenneth Anger’s art prevails.

In his eighth decade, he remains as bold, uncompromising and innately creative as ever, continuing to produce new films and artworks, while performing live as Technicolor Skull. www.kennethanger.org

Kenneth Anger Retrospective –Programme One

Sat 20 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 54 minutes

Fireworks (1947 / 20 minutes)

“A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a ‘light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before.” – Kenneth Anger.

Fireworks remains a landmark of both experimental and gay cinema, a homo-erotic dream within a dream in which a young man, through a series of violent and ecstatic encounters, undergoes a rite of passage. Anger himself plays The Dreamer.

Puce Moment (1949 / 6 minutes)

“A lavish colored evocation of Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of the 1920’s film star.” - Kenneth Anger. A beautiful Hollywood star in a shimmering dress prepares to walk her dogs.

Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1972 / 16 minutes)

A fable of the unattainable (the Moon) combining elements of Commedia dell’Arte with Japanese myth. An enchanting film, this version is the rarely seen original, belatedly released in 1972.

Eaux d’Artifice (1953 / 12 mins)

“Hide and seek in a night-time labyrinth of levels, cascades, balustrades, grottoes, and evergushing leaping fountains, until the water witch and the fountain become one.” - Kenneth Anger.

Tuned to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a Baroque lady flits in and out of Rome’s Tivoli Fountain until she melts into the waters.

Fireworks

Rabbit’s Moon

Programme Two

Sun 21 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 66 minutes

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954 / 38 mins)

“A convocation of magicians assume the identity of gods in a Dionysian revel.” – Kenneth Anger

The title comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The film, subtitled Lord Shiva’s Dream, is a complex meditation of ideas that Anger absorbed from his interest in the occultist Aleister Crowley. The cast features Anger’s friend Anais Nin.

Scorpio Rising (1964 / 28 mins)

“A death mirror held up to American culture. Brando, bikes, black leather.” – Kenneth Anger

Delving into the homoerotic world of bikers, Anger focuses his camera on Scorpio (Bruce Byron), a leather-wearing, crystal methamphetamine-snorting bad boy who is alternately compared to Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and the Devil. Decried as obscene upon its initial release, Scorpio Rising influenced a generation of popular filmmakers.

Total Running Time: 66 minutes

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965 / 3 mins)

“A young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff. Pygmalion and his machine mistress.”

– Kenneth Anger

An elegant hymn to the hot rod as contemporary fetish-object.

Sources for notes: PS1 New York, Subterranean Cinema, Al Chafin

Programme Three

Sat 27 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 51 minutes

Director Kenneth Anger will be in attendance at this screening for a public talk and discussion about his work with Dr. Maeve Connolly.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969 / 12 min)

“A conjuration of pagan forces come off the screen in a surge of spiritual and mystical power. Shadowing forth of Lord Lucifer, as the powers gather at a midnight mass.” - Kenneth Anger. In 1967, the footage for Anger’s Lucifer Rising was stolen by Anger’s Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, who was later convicted for his participation in the Charles Manson murders. After a severe depression and a public renunciation of filmmaking, Anger entered a new period of productivity during which he made Invocation from the original Lucifer Rising.

Rabbit’s Moon (1979 version / 7 mins)

As with several of his key works, Anger revisited his 1950 film (the original can be viewed in Programme One) for this 1979 version.

Lucifer Rising (1972 / 29 mins)

“A film about the love generation - the birthday party of the Aquarian Age showing actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise.” - Kenneth Anger. Anger’s glorious vision of the dawning of the Aquarian Age, with a cast featuring Marianne Faithfull and Donald Cammell, invokes Egyptian and Celtic myth (and flying saucers) to conjure the rise of Anger’s own dream lover.

Rabbit’s Moon Invocation of My Demon Brother

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Ondine Opening Gala

European Premiere

Thurs 18 Feb / Savoy 1 / 7.30pm

Director: Neil Jordan

2009 / Ireland/US / 111 minutes

Principal Cast: Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Stephen Rea, Dervla Kirwan, Alison Barry, Tony Curran

Over the years we have been the nominated transport courier company for many productions, including but not exclusively:

The Tailor Of Panama, Animal Farm, Braveheart, Intermission, Inside I’m Dancing, Kings, Reign of Fire, Murphy’s Law, Tudors, Dublin Film Festival and many, many more

One day a simple fisherman, trawling off the Irish coast, catches a beautiful and mysterious woman in his nets. She appears to be dead but, miraculously, comes back to life before his eyes. So begins Neil Jordan’s deeply enchanting fairy tale: Ondine effortlessly mixes myth and fantasy with the life of a fishing community on the jagged seascapes of the wild southwest.

The fisherman, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), is an irresponsible loner, separated from his wife and distanced from Annie (Alison Barry), his wheelchair-bound daughter. But everyone’s drab and ordinary life is about to change with the arrival of the ethereal Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), the woman from the sea, who may or may not be real. The world-weary Syracuse soon finds himself believing that the stranger may well be a myth come true, a woman sent to change his life and a powerful force for love and hope.

A welcome homecoming for Jordan, Ondine works as a beautifully wrought fable, a romantic re-imagining of the dreary lives of working people, lifted out of their daily routines by an exquisite, unfathomable stranger who suddenly appears in their midst.

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Director’s Statement:

During the Writer’s Strike a Hollywood project fell through… I went back to Ireland, where I have a house in West Cork and wrote this fairy tale, which could be shot entirely within a radius of five miles from where I live. About a fisherman, who pulled up a living girl in his net. His disabled daughter, who invented stories about her. These stories feed on local legends –sea creatures, seal creatures, selkies. How they only have a certain time on land. How they fall in love with their rescuer. How they can make a wish come true. How the sea always calls them back. Much of what the girl invents turns out to be true, but never in ways she expected. The whole thing develops into an impossibly romantic love story, in which real human beings insist on turning their lives into a fairy tale. Because reality is too hard, maybe. Because that is what we love to do, have to do, maybe…

Neil Jordan

Salvador

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Oliver Stone 1986 / US / 122 minutes

Oliver Stone’s Salvador has so many traits of the Hollywood engagé film that on a brief description of it one would be inclined to dismiss it. A South American country torn apart by intervention. A world-weary, cynical journalist in the centre of it, whose perceptions are changed radically by his encounters there. But Stone’s screenplay attacks these tropes with a savagery I have never seen before. And his direction has a raw, bold-faced immediacy that leaves one in absolutely no doubt as to where his convictions lie. The film moves in operatic sweeps, merging fictionalised events and historical reality in a way that in a lesser director’s hands could have been offensive. Watching it, I realised that his character was constructed out of the detritus of the Sixties – the open heart, the anarchy, the indulgence, the drugs, the sex, the destruction of any kind of politics through the persistence of ritualised violence – and that its triumph was even still to be outraged by the destruction of a human being, by the insidiousness of the political lie.

Neil Jordan

Set in the breathtaking Peruvian High Andes, this deeply affecting film is both a meditation on the power of the image and a song of protest against the ravages of war and colonisation. The film intertwines the destinies of two strong women: village beauty Saturnina (Solier) is preparing for marriage, while war photographer Grace (Tabatabai) has returned from a devastating tour of Iraq to bid farewell to her husband (Gourmet), a surgeon working near Saturnina’s village. When a mercury spill contaminates the area, the villagers direct their outrage at the visiting doctors. Brosens and Woodworth’s sublime stylisation is underscored by a driving fascination with reality – the film is inspired by the notorious Choropampa spill – and their storytelling alternately soars with the dreamlike logic of magic realism and plunges with the devastating literalness of photo journalism. Director’s Statement: We believe in the poetic treatment of a complex reality. Altiplano offers the viewer the possibility to reflect on injustice, accountability, faith and redemption.

Mother

Altiplano

L’affaire Farewell (Farewell)

Ward No. 6

Fri 19 Feb / Light House / 6.00pm

Directors: Aleksandr Gornovsky, Karen Shakhnazarov

2009 / Russia / 83 minutes

Principal Cast: Vladimir Ilyin, Alexsei Yvegeni, Evgeny Stychkin Screening with the short film, If These Walls Could Talk. See page 20. Director Karen Shakhnazarov will be in attendance at this screening

Fri 19 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Director: Bong Joon-ho

2009 / Korea / 128 minutes

Principal Cast: Kim Hye-ja, Park Eun-kyo, Won Bin, Jin Goo

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Directors: Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth 2009 / Belgium/Germany/The Netherlands /

109 minutes

Principal Cast: Magaly Solier, Jasmin Tabatabai, Olivier Gourmet

After only three films, including his international breakthrough The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho’s slightly bent and always inventive approach to genre filmmaking has pushed him to the forefront of Korean cinema. Although Mother is a dazzling murder mystery, it’s also built on Bong’s reliable penchant for psychologically astute, character-centered storytelling. The single mother Hye-ja (played with fearless intensity by revered Korean TV star Kim Hye-ja) works at a pharmacy, and occasionally engages in illegal activities to make ends meet. Her raison d’etre, her mentally challenged beautiful son Do-joon (Won Bin), proves to be a constant source of anxiety. When a young teenage girl turns up dead, the police arrest Do-joon, pushing the boundaries of the mother-son relationship to the extreme. Beautifully shot by Hong Kyung-pyo, the film’s landscapes fuse with the heroine’s elemental force to overwhelming effect. Once again, Bong takes the conventional and transforms it into something extraordinary.

Rose Kuo, AFI Film Festival Programme

Fri 19 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Christian Carion / 2009 / France / 114 minutes

Principal Cast: Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet, Alexandra Maria Lara, Willem Dafoe

Moscow, 1981: KGB spy Sergei Grigoriev (a brooding, layered performance by filmmaker Emir Kusturica) has decided to leak documents to the West. Pierre Froment (Canet), a French engineer working in Moscow, has no connection to espionage until his boss draws him into a dangerous game. Grigoriev will pass the documents to Froment, who will relay them to French intelligence. Divulging proof of how deeply the KGB has infiltrated the West, the Russian hopes to precipitate an American reaction, and with it the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is not a car-chase spy thriller: L’affaire Farewell probes the impact of the spyversus-spy atmosphere on these two men and their families, as director Christian Carion (Noël) handles the high-stakes narrative with deft skill. A superb supporting cast includes Willem Dafoe as the head of the CIA and Fred Ward (!) as Ronald Reagan.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

As you watch the impressively tortured Vladimir Ilyin play a psychologist turned mental patient in this Anton Chekhov update, you wonder how the great Marcello Mastroianni (originally attached) would have sashayed his way into madness. No matter: the script, several decades old, has found an absorbing treatment here — a Blair Witch–like collage of interviews, recollections and creepy conversations that scrape the far edge of metaphysical uncertainty. After some upsettingly authentic interviews with patients confined to a ruined institute, we meet Ragin (Ilyin), staring into the shallow distance on his cot. The movie charts his descent, and it’s the suggestive strength of this material — mainly Ragin’s thoughtful chats with the bitter, brilliant Gromov (Vertkov) — that gets you thinking he might actually be evolving, not unraveling. Ward No. 6 gets the Chekhovian tone just right.

Time Out

This screening is supported by Aiken Promotions.

Celebrating The National Film School At IADT

Fri 19 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm Ireland / 90 minutes

To celebrate a quarter of a century of the teaching of film-making in Dun Laoghaire, the JDIFF is delighted to present a selection of its live action graduate films. Beginning in the academic year 1984/85 at the then Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design, the National Film School at IADT has become the leading centre of excellence in the country at third level for professional education in film, television, animation and new media, and is the only full member in Ireland of CILECT, the international Association of Film and Television Schools. The NFS has built its reputation on the consistently high percentage of its graduates entering the entertainment and media industry, whose achievements have also been recognised through successes in competitions and festivals, both at home and abroad. Last month NFS graduates received 17 nominations for the 2010 IFTA Awards.

The National Film School at IADT offers highly innovative programmes in the following disciplines:

• BA (Hons) in Animation

• BA (Hons) in Film and Television Production

• BA (Hons) in Model Making, Design and Digital Effects

• BA (Hons) in Photography

• BA (Hons) in Design for Stage and Screen

• MA in Broadcast Production for Radio and Television

• MA/MSc in Digital Media

• MA in Screenwriting

1984/85 to 2009/10

25 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE

Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology

Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland t: +353 (0) 1 239 4000 f: +353 (0) 1 239 4700

Email: info@ nationalfilmschool.ie www.iadt.ie

His & Hers

The creator of a number of acclaimed documentary shorts, Ken Wardrop‘s distinctive first feature has a deceptively simple conceit that manages to deliver an honest and revealing insight into life in the country, and has already been selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Inspired by the story of his mother’s life, Wardrop presents interviews with women from across the midlands of Ireland.

Starting with some in their nappies and ending in a nursing home, the women talk about their experiences and their relationships with and attitudes towards men. These daughters, wives and mammies are by turns frank, funny, gracious, perceptive and moving. Collectively, the interviews form the narrative of life, from cradle to grave, in an inventive and original way. While each scene is beautifully composed, Wardrop uses only one static camera, allowing the stories to dominate the frame.

The Scouting Book for Boys

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