At the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz in 1949 a group of young cinéastes came together. With their challenge to established cinema, they incorporated the new generation, the later Nouvelle Vague. The winner of the festival in the category Poetic Film was the 19-year-old American Kenneth Anger with his film Fireworks. One weekend in 1947 – Mr. and Mrs. Anger had gone to a funeral – 17-year-old Kenneth had availed himself of the opportunity and made an experimental film in his parents’ apartment; it was to become a milestone in the history of the genre. While the Nouvelle Vague attempted to oppose the bourgeois traditions of the cinema, Anger’s films constituted a critique of the dream factory Hollywood. He had his own, very different approach to collective dreams, myths and desire. Anger’s films are not narrative, they present images of magic rituals in which each sign points to some unknown transcendence. The heightened sensuality resulting from the intensely opulent colours and the way individual images are blended imbue these films with a baroque splendour. Anger’s technique of linking image and sound and his borrowings from popular culture were formative and would later impact the genre of the music video. Anger inspired the Rolling Stones to their hit song Sympathy for the Devil and greatly influenced film directors such as David Lynch, Donald Cammell, Roger Corman, R. W. Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese, who called Anger “an artist of exceptional imagination”.

This exhibition of Kenneth Anger’s oeuvre at the Künstlerhaus Bremen is his first solo exhibition in Germany.

On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue will be published by Revolver.

PROGRAM

18 May 2006, 7.30 p.m. Screening Eins plus Eins, Jean-Luc Godard (1968)
2 July 2006, 7.30 p.m. Film als magisches Ritual Lecture by Dr. Robin Curtis, Medienwissenschaftlerin, Berlin

Guided tours: 13 April 2006, 7 p.m.; 27 April 2006, 7 p.m.; 11 May 2006, 7 p.m.; 1 June 2006, 7 p.m.; 22 June 2006, 7 p.m.

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